Sturm, Melvin

ORAL HISTORY OF MELVIN STURM
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
December 1, 2010
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December the 1st, 2010. And I am with a Mr. Melvin Sturm at his home in Knoxville. Mr. Sturm, thank you for taking time to be with us.
Mr. Sturm: It’s a pleasure. Glad to be here.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back to the beginning. Tell me where were you born and raised, and tell me a little bit about your family.
Mr. Sturm: Well, I was very fortunate. I have a wonderful family. I was born in Appalachia, Virginia in 1923, November 27th, three days ago. My birthday was Saturday. I’m eighty-seven years old. My parents were in the retail business in Appalachia, Virginia. Appalachia was a brand new town. It was founded in 1921, and mainly served the coal mining industry. I was second in line; I had an older brother Howard. And following me, I have a brother, Hiram, who was born two-and-a-half years later, and a brother born three years later, Evan. So there was four Sturm brothers. The only female in our family was our mother.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: Yep.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, where was that in Virginia, what part of Virginia?
Mr. Sturm: Appalachia, Virginia is very near – it’s in Wise County. It’s very near where the state of Tennessee and Virginia and Kentucky meet.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, down near the corner down there.
Mr. Sturm: Yeah, I would say maybe it’s a hundred-and-fifty miles from here.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay.
Mr. Sturm: My father was born in New York City in 1890. My mother was born in 1894, near Vilna, Lithuania, and came to this country when she was about four years old. My father and mother met in Barberville, Kentucky, in 1920. And it was rural, with mountains, and they married after knowing each other for six weeks.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: And along came four sons, and I was number two in the line. And all through high school, we lived in either southern Kentucky, or – I finished high school in La Follette, Tennessee. Then after La Follette High School, I attended University of Tennessee at Knoxville, entered in 1940, graduated in 1944 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and I’ve always thought that east Tennessee is one of the most beautiful spots in the world.
Mr. McDaniel: How did your parents end up in Barberville, Kentucky?
Mr. Sturm: There was a major worldwide flu epidemic in 1917, and my father had a younger sister, and the parents were worried that the flu epidemic was wiping people out right and left. My grandmother had a sister who was already living in Pineville, Kentucky, rural Kentucky, and to perhaps escape the ravages of the flu epidemic, which was wiping out tens of thousands of people, they moved to Pineville, Kentucky and opened a restaurant business and served the railroad crews that were building the railroads through southern Kentucky at that time. Then they stayed. They never went back to New York.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, interesting story, and I’ll interject this: my father was born in 1917, and he got the flu as an infant, and they didn’t expect him to live, but he pulled through it.
Mr. Sturm: Yes, the flu epidemic was – and of course, even today they worry about a new strain of flu, that is not knocked out by the antibodies and the serums, could wipe out a lot of people again.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly.
Mr. Sturm: We hear that talk today.
Mr. McDaniel: So you lived in La Follette, and you went to the University of Tennessee.
Mr. Sturm: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: What year did you graduate?
Mr. Sturm: I graduated in 1944, the class of ’44. I was very fortunate in that I entered college quite young. I was sixteen when I matriculated at the university, and by the time the draft for World War II started, I was already entering my junior year of engineering, so I needed about a year-and-a-half of deferment. And since the country was anxious to have engineers, I had a deferment to finish my last [semester]. So I was able to graduate college before going into service. Immediately upon graduation, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. The Navy is familiar territory to my family, because all four of the sons served in the U.S. Navy, two of us during World War II, two of us during the Korean War.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: So directly out of college, I entered training in Hollywood, Florida, at a training station, was there six months, and shipped out to the Pacific. I had a very fortunate, lucky Navy career the two years that I was in. I was in an officer’s pool at Pearl Harbor awaiting assignment and ended up being assigned to Admiral Halsey’s staff. So I spent my Navy time mostly aboard the USS Missouri, but aboard other combatant ships as well. So I was on Halsey’s staff and had the good fortune to be there for the surrender ceremony.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? What was that like?
Mr. Sturm: Well, many nations were represented by their top ranking military officers. There were Russian officers there and French and British and Australian, and I don’t know, a list of maybe thirty countries. Of course, McArthur was aboard my – Admiral Halsey was there at the signing, standing alongside the table. There was a fly-over of about two thousand planes during this ceremony. It was a momentous occasion.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet.
Mr. Sturm: You know, when I talk about it now, sixty some odd years later, it brings up a lot of emotion. At the time, you know, there wasn’t, and for fifty years – it’s only when the 50th Anniversary came around that people really began to talk about World War II. I had a very good – my duty station was in Flag Plot aboard the USS Missouri, and I had expressed to my senior officer, just senior to me on the staff, that it would be interesting to see what life was like aboard a carrier. He said, “No problem,” and in two days I had orders to go over to Admiral McCain’s staff aboard the carrier Shangri-La. In fact, I was aboard the Shangri-La when they dropped the first nuclear device.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Sturm: Yeah, and of course Admiral McCain was the grandfather of Senator McCain, who just ran for president of the United States. So after the Navy, I spent two years in there, and the war was over, and I drove across the country with a friend who had won – a UT graduate also, who had won a new car. And in 1946, new cars were very hard to come by. He had entered an American Legion raffle and he won this car. Doug and I, Doug Gunn and I, drove across the country, stopped in Chicago. I hadn’t been home yet, and I thought, “You know, I’m an engineer. I think I’ll need a job now that I’m out of service.” I went to an agency, and they sent me to a company called Fairbanks Morrison Company. And we did an interview and they said, “You’re hired. You can go to work tomorrow.” I said, “Wait a minute, I don’t have any clothes. All I’ve got is uniforms, and I haven’t been home, yet.” They said, “Okay, if you work two weeks, we’ll give you a two weeks paid vacation to go home.” So the first two weeks, I worked in a Navy uniform.
Mr. McDaniel: What a wonderful thing to do. And I guess that was 1946?
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: To come back from your service, and drive across the country. I imagine the country was still recovering from the war.
Mr. Sturm: Yes, everything was a shortage. I had a hard time buying clothes, especially a suit. You couldn’t get a car. I mean, they were impossible.
Mr. McDaniel: But I imagine the spirit of America was really at an all-time high, you know.
Mr. Sturm: Oh, yeah. Well, I remember coming home on the – the admiral transferred the staff to the USS South Dakota, a battleship, and we left the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. And we took thirty days to come back to the States. We could’ve done it in half the time, but the ports were so busy on the West Coast receiving military personnel, all coming back to the United States. So we would go two days towards the U.S., and then we’d turn and go back towards Japan for a day. It took thirty days.
Mr. McDaniel: Otherwise, if you got there, you would just have to sit there, wouldn’t you?
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And just wait.
Mr. Sturm: I remember vividly, we were with a group of ships, a small group, and we went under the Golden Gate Bridge, and the fire boats came out and had the water spraying, and people were standing on the Golden Gate Bridge waving, and – very dramatic.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. I imagine at this point in your life, when you think back to those times, think back to those events, those are some once in a lifetime events.
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: As you mentioned, you probably didn’t fully appreciate at the time, but now you do.
Mr. Sturm: Oh, yes. Well, from the vantage point of eighty-seven years, it’s emotional, because – whew, so many guys didn’t do it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, I understand.
Mr. Sturm: So many people didn’t come home.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, I understand.
Mr. Sturm: And yet, you had sixty more years or more of life.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: I recently went back aboard the Missouri. I went on a cruise, and I was in Hawaii, and the Missouri is now a museum in Pearl Harbor. And I purposely wore a cap that I had that had USS Missouri written across it. So I wore it that day. And when the person selling the tickets saw my cap, he said, “Have you ever been aboard the Missouri before?” I said, “Not in sixty years and four months.” His eyes got big.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet.
Mr. Sturm: And he called over to the ship, to the curator of the museum, and they met me at the gang plank, the gang way, and gave me a tour. I wanted to see my old quarters. You know, not everything is open to the public.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Sturm: And they gave me souvenirs and it was fun.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. Okay, so you came back. You drove –
Mr. Sturm: I took a job in engineering.
Mr. McDaniel: You took a job as an engineer. You worked there for two weeks, and then you had a two week paid vacation.
Mr. Sturm: That’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: And was that in Chicago? Was that job in Chicago?
Mr. Sturm: The job was in Chicago. Their factory was in Beloit, Wisconsin, which I visited on several occasions, but my job was in downtown Chicago. And it was a great opportunity, because Northwestern University had a downtown campus. For about a year and a half, I lived in a dormitory, in a high-rise dorm building in downtown Chicago on Lake Michigan, and used to have breakfast every morning, and you’d see the limos going by with people that – the owners sitting in the back reading the paper. And I thought, “Well, one day I’d like to do that.” But Chicago is a great city, and I lived there three years. I was also in the Naval Reserve there. I went to night school at Northwestern and took all the kind of courses that engineers don’t get to take, like music appreciation, and law, and art, and etymology, and just all the kind of things that – music – that engineers don’t have time for when you’re in a regular curriculum. I was working for Fairbanks Morris. It was my third year there, and – oh, incidentally, I should mention that the – so others nowadays might appreciate – my starting salary was a hundred-and-eighty-five dollars a month, which was ten dollars higher than they were paying the other engineers that were in there, the young new engineers, so my beginning salary was a hundred-and-eighty-five dollars a month, and I could do anything I wanted to with all that money.
Mr. McDaniel: That was pretty good pay back then, wasn’t it?
Mr. Sturm: That was good pay.
Mr. McDaniel: When you left the service, how much were you making in the service?
Mr. Sturm: I think as a Lieutenant JG I was getting maybe like a hundred-and-sixty-five dollars a month. Somewhere in the hundred-and-thirty-five, hundred-and-sixty-five, of which a third of it went to buy U.S. war bonds, because that was patriotic, you know. So when I was in the service, about a third of my salary was going to buy U.S. savings bonds. Many years later I realized if I’d have put that money into the stock market instead of U.S. savings bonds, it would’ve been a different story.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: I got a call one day that my father had been in an automobile accident in which he lost his life, and I came back to Tennessee. My father had bought a business in Jellico, Tennessee in January. In April, the accident happened. He was on a civic mission for the town of Jellico. A little background on that – Grace Moore, the opera star, was born in Jellico. The University of Tennessee had a memorial concert, and there was a cavalcade that went over from Jellico to Knoxville to attend this event. And on the way back – well, and my father hadn’t planned to go, but they came to him and asked him, “There’s two teenage girls, high schoolers, who would like to go to the concert and don’t have a ride.” He said, “Well, I’ll do that.” And on the way home from that concert, a delivery truck –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, hold on just a second. I think your microphone has come loose. I’ll get you to tell that story.
Mr. Sturm: This is far afield from Oak Ridge, though.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. This is all background information. It’s good to know. We’re not just interested in Oak Ridge, we’re interested in you. I’m going to redo this a little bit.
Mr. Sturm: Is the mic okay, now?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, it’s good. So your father had gone –
Mr. Sturm: So my – went to the concert. In fact, there was a picture in the News Sentinel the next day showing the Jellico contingency of about a hundred-and-some-odd people. And my father’s picture with those two girls that were riding with him was in the News Sentinel. On the way home, about eleven o’clock p.m. at night, very near Lake City, a delivery man who had stopped, I think, at every beer tavern on the way back to Knoxville, it was like eleven-something in the evening, and he came around a curve. My father saw the truck coming. The truck didn’t make the curve. He was drunk. He just plowed directly into my father’s car. He survived for about six hours and expired.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Sturm: And he had bought this business – it was a general clothing store in Jellico – in January. This is four months later. So of the four sons, one was still on active duty in the Navy, one was in med school, and my other brother was also in the Navy. It seemed like – I took a leave of absence from my company for three months to close up the business, pay off the creditors, and return to Chicago. Well, it wasn’t that simple. So I took another three months leave of absence, and about the fourth month I realized, you know, I think this business is making a profit, because I’m able to pay the bank a thousand dollars a month on the notes. And I was in charge. It was going to take me ten more years in engineering to get up to the same level of income and maybe responsibility. Plus, my mother needed me, and so a mechanical engineer left engineering and became a retailer.
Mr. McDaniel: What was that, about 1950?
Mr. Sturm: That was 1949. I’d been in Chicago since ’46. And I enjoyed retailing. Jellico’s a town of – a population of 2,602 when I was there. I don’t think it’s much more today.
Mr. McDaniel: So you knew everybody, didn’t you?
Mr. Sturm: But in a small town, there are no young people. I mean, they graduate from high school and then there’s very few jobs. It’s typical of all small towns: they invest in their young people, and the moment they graduate from high school, they export them to some other community. And it’s really tough. One of the things I’m most proud of and one of the things I’m very proud of in living is that I grew up in a small town. When I was in Chicago, you would meet people, and they would immediately call you – “Where are you from?” “Tennessee.” “Oh, you’re a hillbilly. You’re wearing shoes,” you know.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mr. Sturm: And they didn’t know that, inside, my feeling was exactly the reverse. I was extremely proud to have been raised in a small town in east Tennessee, and I called them ‘citybillies.’ I wasn’t a hillbilly; they were ‘citybillies.’
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: So I ended up staying in retailing. After about six years, I met a wonderful young lady from Chattanooga by the name of Francis Alper. We courted, we wed, but I knew that I couldn’t take a bride back and keep her in Jellico where there were no young people. I started to comment earlier that a small town embraced a young college graduate. Let’s see, I was twenty-six years old, and they just were very happy to have a young person in town. I lived there six years. I ended up forming a Chamber of Commerce, joined Kiwanis; I was President of Kiwanis. I served on a three-man utility board. They convinced me that I ought to run for City Council, and I was Commissioner of Finance for two years. Then they came to me and said, “Mel, we want you to run for Mayor.” I said, “I don’t plan to do that.” And they said, “Well, you don’t have to do anything, just let us put your name up.” And I said, “Okay.” I was elected and I served a term as mayor of Jellico. Mind you, I was in my late twenties. So I married this lovely girl, Fran Alper, and I brought her to Jellico. When her parents visited – when we announced our engagement – this is in Chattanooga – and we’re at my mother’s home on Cumberland Avenue in Jellico, Fran’s mother took her aside and said, “You must really love him to come,” so I knew that we weren’t going to stay there. When my brother got out of the Navy, I sort of turned the business over to him and opened a retail business in Oak Ridge. And why Oak Ridge? Well, we considered many places. We knew people in Memphis and Nashville and Atlanta and Chattanooga, and I said, “No, let’s move to Oak Ridge.” And a friend was opening a shopping center, later to be called the Downtown Shopping Center, and I went to him and I said, “I’d like to open a retail store in your new center,” so I’d be able to support myself and my wife and we could live in Oak Ridge. And he said, “Well, what kind of business do you want?” I said, “Well, I think maybe a” – my business in Jellico was generally apparel, men’s, women’s, children’s, linoleum, rugs, you name it, piece goods. He said, “We don’t need a men’s store. We’ve got this one and this one.” And I said, “Well, perhaps I’ll open a ladies’ shop.” He said, “We don’t need one, we’ve got this one.” I said, “Well, what kind of store do you need in your shopping center?” He said, “We don’t have a children’s store.” I said, “Okay.” [laughter] But I didn’t do it that casually, because I had done some research, and I discovered that Oak Ridge, at that time, had one of the highest birthrates in the nation. In 1950 – this is now 1955 – there was about a thousand infants born in Oak Ridge every year.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Sturm: And because the population – I should back up to my first work in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, please.
Mr. Sturm: I was between my junior and senior year in engineering school in Knoxville, and I was on an accelerated program in order to graduate before I went into the service, so I had about a six-week break between my summer quarter and the beginning of the fall semester quarter, and I applied for a job in Oak Ridge. It was employing, what, seventy-five thousand people. And sure enough, they had a job, even a short term job, for me. I signed on as a timekeeper in a welding shop, what is now K-25, and I got paid seventy-five cents an hour, which in 1943 was a lot of money. And it was aided by the fact that we worked a fifty hour week instead of a forty hour week, so I got time-and-a-half. I felt rich.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. When you worked there, were you living in Knoxville?
Mr. Sturm: No, I was living at home with my parents. Out of school, I didn’t have accommodations at the university. I was living in La Follette. I would get up at four o’clock in the morning, I’d walk downtown where a gentleman lived at the Russell Hotel, I’d join up with him, and we’d drive to Oak Ridge to get to work on time. And when my ten hour shift was over, we’d drive back to La Follette. So I’d get up at four o’clock in the morning, and it was frequently six or seven o’clock in the evening before I would get back home for dinner. Then you’d go to bed and you’d go back. That was for six weeks and I loved it.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Sturm: I had money. You know, when I entered college in 1944, we were – in 1940, we were in a different economy than we are today. Minimum wage was a quarter. An amusing thing happened recently –
Mr. McDaniel: But a loaf of bread was ten cents, or something like that, so there’s –
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. Oh, I mean, if the telephone bill was more than two-and-a-quarter, two dollars and twenty-five cents, my father wanted to know what happened. And today, people with their cell phones, and multiple cell phones for a family, people have two-hundred-dollar-a-month phone bills today. So after school took session, I came back to the university and finished my senior year. But Oak Ridge, I remember the Turnpike was gravel and dirt, and the Central Bus Station was extremely active. In that era, I think the workforce was about seventy to seventy-five thousand. Well, Oak Ridge only housed maybe – with dormitories and flat-tops and so on – maybe housed, I don’t know, maybe thirty thousand.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, thirty, forty thousand, something like that.
Mr. Sturm: Yeah, which meant all the rest of the workforce had to commute. And people commuted from distant – well, La Follette was about an hour-and-a-half, hour and thirty minute drive, maybe, in those days, because after all, there were no interstates, two-lane roads packed with cars. You had ration cards to get gasoline.
Mr. McDaniel: So you had fond memories of Oak Ridge.
Mr. Sturm: Oh, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you were thinking about where to go, you had –
Mr. Sturm: Well, what I knew of Oak Ridge, the big attraction to me, as a young newlywed, was the amazing population of Oak Ridge. I mean, it had young men and women from all over the world. Well, all over the United States, and from the world as well. I’m sorry, in 1943, it was U.S. citizens. But when I moved there in 1955, it was citizens of the world. And to illustrate what it was to live in Oak Ridge at that time, in 1955-56, I used to go on buying trips to New York to buy for my children’s store, and I remember one occasion the owner of this manufacturing company came in just to chat with his customers. I was writing order and he saw that I was having it shipped to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He said, “Oak Ridge?” He said, “I’ve heard of Oak Ridge. Isn’t that a nuclear town?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How big is Oak Ridge?” I said, “To me, Oak Ridge is a population of about a million people.” He said, “Oh, I didn’t know it was that big.” “Oh,” I said, “no, the actual population is about twenty-nine thousand.” I said, “But to me,” and see, at that time, I was thirty-two years old – see, Oak Ridge was farmland, and then it brought all these young scientists in, and young people to do the job, and I figured that I would have to live in a city of a million population to have twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand people who were around my age, around my educational background, around my income level, around my background level.
Mr. McDaniel: Who had culture and all the artistic endeavors that were going on in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Sturm: Well, and you had character. These people – well, one thing, they had all been cleared by the FBI. [laughter] When I was in business, someone in Knoxville asked me, “How can you go open a business in a one industry town? Because if that industry goes out of business, everything you’ve invested is gone.” I said, “Well, it’s true. Typically, you don’t go into business in a one industry town.” I said, “But this industry is nuclear.” I said, “It’s going to be here a long time.” Well, there are plenty of stories about people – the people who came to Oak Ridge thought they were coming for a year, two years, three years, then they were going to go back home. Well, they stayed.
Mr. McDaniel: And there are thousands of people in Oak Ridge today who came for a year or two, and they’ve been here for fifty or sixty years.
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. Unfortunately, too many of those are going to the great beyond. And it’s one of the things that I worked on pretty hard was finding a way to make Oak Ridge a viable community for a long number of years, because it started there with a bulge of population. Everybody was twenty-five to thirty-five years old. I mean, someone fifty was an old person in 1943.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you opened your business. And what was the name of your business?
Mr. Sturm: The name was Sturm’s Youth World.
Mr. McDaniel: And it was in the Downtown Shopping Center.
Mr. Sturm: It was in the Downtown Shopping Center. Before that, to test the waters of what it would be like to be in business in Oak Ridge, a friend that I knew had married a college friend of mine and classmate of mine – his name was Homer Kramer – he married a young woman that I knew well, Genevieve Shaw, now Genevieve Shaw Kramer. Homer was working as an auditor for the Department of Energy, but he wanted to be in the retail business and had had a job part-time at Sears. So together, we opened a shoe store. It was called Kramer Sturm Shoe Store. There was no Downtown at that time. Every space was government owned. And he sub-leased a space in what was called the Winder Building. It was the building – The Oak Ridger was at the other end of that building, in those days, and I think it was on Tyrone Road, very close to Jackson Square. We opened that business, and then when the Downtown Shopping Center was available, we moved the store into the Downtown Shopping Center. It was Kramer Sturm Shoe Store. My store was called Sturm’s Youth World. Then later, I added – you know, one thing about a children’s store is, no matter how well you service your customers –
Mr. McDaniel: They grow up.
Mr. Sturm: They outgrow you, so you have to keep cultivating new customers. It’s not like if you had a men’s store. I mean, a person starts wearing adult clothes, male adult clothes maybe at age sixteen or seventeen, and then for the rest of their lives you keep them as a customer. You don’t do that with children. But it was a fun business to be in.
Mr. McDaniel: So you opened another store?
Mr. Sturm: Well, I opened up Sturm’s Youth World. And then, as my customers grew, I opened up a store called Backstage. And Backstage catered to young, pre-teen girls.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Was that at the Downtown Shopping Center as well?
Mr. Sturm: That was also in the Downtown – and the reason we called it Backstage is that you could enter through my children’s store, and then a space became available – there was a – I think, Argonne Plaza – there was a plaza to the right of my store. There was my store, there was Bank of Oak Ridge was next to me on one side, and the other was McCrory’s. And then there was – Kimball Jewelry, I believe was there. It’s still a jewelry store, I think.
Mr. McDaniel: There was a breezeway right there.
Mr. Sturm: It was Argonne Plaza.
Mr. McDaniel: Argonne Plaza, that’s right.
Mr. Sturm: Named after another nuclear site.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, of course.
Mr. Sturm: And there was a space – there was a barbershop back there, and there was a restaurant – there was a deli. And the deli moved out and that space was available. So you could enter Backstage off of Argonne Plaza, or you could enter through the Youth World on the main street.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. What year did you open Backstage?
Mr. Sturm: Well, it must’ve been maybe ’65, 1965 maybe, right in there. That was a fun enterprise. Oak Ridge was a great place to do business. I mean, first place, if you lived in – I remember in rural Tennessee, you live in a small town in Tennessee, the customer wasn’t going to buy something, they didn’t want to hurt your feelings, and they’d say, “I’ll be back.” They never saw them again.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: In Oak Ridge, it was different. A customer – the wife would come in and look at children’s apparel, and she says, “Well, I’ll be back.” Well, she would. She’d come and bring the child after school, and they would try on clothes. And then she might say – still not buy it, says, “I’ll be back,” and she’d bring the husband down to approve the purchase. So in Oak Ridge, when they said, “I’ll be back,” they meant it.
Mr. McDaniel: They meant it and came back.
Mr. Sturm: It wasn’t an excuse to leave the store.
Mr. McDaniel: Now let me go back just a minute. You said a friend of yours was going to open that Downtown Shopping Center. That was Gilford Glazer?
Mr. Sturm: Gilford Glazer, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: How did you know him?
Mr. Sturm: Well, Gilford also went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He wasn’t in school when I was, but I knew the Glazer family. I knew Jerome, his brother, younger brother, and I knew Louis, his older brother. Those three formed a construction company. Their first project was Shelbourne Towers in Knoxville. It was a large – it was the largest residential apartment building in Knoxville. Then Gilford negotiated with the government. When I moved to Oak Ridge, government owned everything, every school, every business location, every residential location. The government built the hospital. And it wasn’t until – let’s see, when Oak Ridge incorporated –
Mr. McDaniel: In 1959.
Mr. Sturm: Well, I know they sold the property in ’59, but they incorporated as a town –
Mr. McDaniel: They had voted to incorporate in 1959, and it was July 1st, 1960 is when the keys were turned over to the –
Mr. Sturm: Well, I can remember, I was still living in Jellico, and there was a – what was the name, the Oak Ridge Community Council or something?
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: Before there was a –
Mr. McDaniel: Before the City Council.
Mr. Sturm: I remember Bob McNeese was, perhaps, Chairman of that. And somehow or other, before even moving here, I knew Bob, and I was invited to sit in on that Council. I wasn’t a member of the Council, but I was invited to be there and sit in on the Town Council meetings.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. They opened the gates in 1949, and then it took them ten years to be able to incorporate. So that’s when the vote happened, in 1959. I did a documentary on that a couple of years ago. But that’s when it happened. So up until then – but the housing started being transferred around the mid ’50s. That’s when they started –
Mr. Sturm: I would say ’57.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, it was that time.
Mr. Sturm: Because I can remember disposal – well touching on that subject –
Mr. McDaniel: The disposal bill – sure.
Mr. Sturm: I can remember when they offered – the government owned everything, and they offered the occupants of houses and of businesses the opportunity to buy their house. The mood was, ‘Well, I’m going to go back to Ohio, or Indiana, or New York.’ And there was a fifteen percent – the government appraised everything, and they offered an incentive of fifteen percent below the appraisal price if you were the resident and would buy your house. They would give you another ten percent off, a total of twenty-five percent, if you waived the employment agreement. They had an agreement that, at the fifteen percent off level, that if the employment fell – I don’t know – below a certain level, that they would take the house back.
Mr. McDaniel: They’d take the house back, right.
Mr. Sturm: But if you – but for another ten percent, you waived that. And I think most people – Oak Ridgers had fairly high IQs. They all figured out – I won’t say they all did.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, most of the people did. I have a good friend who bought his house. It wasn’t a “D”, it was maybe an “F” house. I mean, it was a large house.
Mr. Sturm: Well, “F” was the largest.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, I think it was an “F” house, for like –
Mr. Sturm: There was a “B”, “C”, “D”, “E”, and “F”.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, for like thirty-two hundred dollars, or something like that, in the mid ’50s.
Mr. Sturm: Yeah. I’ll digress to say that that proved to be one of Oak Ridge’s major economic problems is the fact that a very expensive – when the government appraised them, people – I think the top appraisal was from the range of maybe five thousand dollars. That’s for the best house on the best lot. And others sold in the range of twenty-eight hundred to thirty-three hundred. In fact, I still have the newspapers that listed all of the houses and what they sold for. That proved to be a real problem later, because the housing was a hundred percent occupied. There was no spare housing. So if someone got a job in Oak Ridge, there was no place to live. When I moved to Oak Ridge in 1955, forty-three percent of the Department of Energy workforce lived in Oak Ridge, which meant fifty-seven percent, more than half, lived out of Oak Ridge. And I said, “What a wonderful opportunity,” because the minute you build housing, we’re going to gain a lot of population. And if people work here, they don��t want to live someplace else. But Oak Ridge had one of the first planning commissions in this whole region. And in the wisdom of the planning commission, they put down a lot of roadblocks for building new housing, so new housing didn’t materialize very quick. But after disposal, large tracts of land were available. Groups bought them, individuals bought them and started developing lots. But the development restrictions were difficult. Not only were they difficult, but they were implemented in a rigid manner.
Mr. McDaniel: I think that’s not changed in fifty years, either.
Mr. Sturm: It has not changed in fifty years. I’ll jump ahead to say that I was at a Rotary Club meeting in Oak Ridge, and Sam Sapirie, who was head of the Atomic Energy Commission in Oak Ridge, he was now the top administrator for the government, and Sam made a talk at Rotary, and he said, “The Atomic Energy Commission is closing a facility out west, and it’s going to create about two thousand new jobs in Oak Ridge in the next two years.” I left that meeting and I went back to my retail store, and I sat at my desk and I said, “But Oak Ridge has a hundred percent occupancy, the equivalent of a hundred percent occupancy of all of its housing. Where are these two thousand new jobs going to live?” And then I realized – I looked at building. We were building about ten houses a month, a hundred-and-twenty a year. We’re going to get a thousand jobs for two years. Anyway, I calculated we’re going to house fourteen percent of those workers, maximum. So I started thinking about this more, and I wrote out a speech. I made a speech at Rotary about the housing crisis, that we have a crisis in housing, that we’ve got two thousand employees coming here, and these are not your typical minimum wage jobs, and these people who are going to come here are mostly going to be college graduates. They’re going to have wives who are college graduates. We need those people living in Oak Ridge. This is like 1968, 1969. So I started speaking out, and as a member of the Chamber of Commerce, a man named Herm Snyder and I wrote a book called, “The Housing Study of 19[70],” published in 1970. I was working full-time in my retail business, and retailing is not engineering where you work thirty-seven to forty hours a week. In retailing those days, I was working sixty and seventy hours a week. But whatever spare time, I would go to the Oak Ridge [Public] Library or to the Chamber of Commerce and sit and write. And we produced this housing study, which is still around. It’s about a half inch thick bound volume, and it covered everything about the demographics of the community, the school population, the policies of development, how our taxes were, and we produced this study. Unfortunately, when it was given to City Council, and when the Chamber of Commerce presented it to City Council – in fact, I came across a picture the other day of me handing the study, Les Dale and I – Les was President of the Chamber of Commerce – handed the report to, I think, Hardy. I’m not remembering his first name, John Hardy, maybe? Anyway, we were presenting it to him. There’s a picture that was in the paper. Well, unfortunately, it was taken as criticism. The study, which pointed out the parameters of what was going on in Oak Ridge was taken by City Council and Planning Commission as criticism, which it was the last thing in our mind to be critical. What we were doing is trying to point out the situation, and to try to do something about it, improve the regulations and the framework for development in Oak Ridge. And unfortunately, it didn’t move many people. But since then, one of the thoughts that occurred to me, and it was a wartime thought, there was the expression, “point of no return.” What that referred to was you would send a bomber patrol, a bomber group out on a bombing mission. Well, they only had so much fuel, and if they got beyond – if they used up half of their fuel and went beyond that, there was no way to get back home, and my thought at that time was that if Oak Ridge continues on the path we were on, of denying people the opportunity to live in the community, not openly, but by not providing housing, that we would one day go beyond the point of no return. And our work on the housing study was to try to prevent that.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So what were the ramifications for you, personally, or for your business after that? Or did people generally support the housing study, I mean, as far as the business community and civic leaders?
Mr. Sturm: Well, it just got buried. And it wasn’t my personal nature to cram something down someone’s throat. You know, you lay it out, here it is, this is the picture, and it’s up to you to do something with it. I was in no frame of mind to try to impose the thinking on other people. And after all, Oak Ridge is full of very bright people. One of the reactions was ‘growth is bad,’ because growth meant there’d be more cars on the Turnpike, there’d be more kids in the classroom, and it would be a burden. And in fact, Oak Ridge also had – you know, I was a retailer, and if I didn’t make a profit, I didn’t have a salary. And I couldn’t expand or grow my business. So retailers have to make a profit. Well, in Oak Ridge, where everyone was employed by government, ‘profit’ was not a nice word. When you said the word ‘profit’ in Oak Ridge, it meant too much profit, excessive, gouging. What profit really means, it gives you the strength, the vigor, to be better tomorrow. But it isn’t heard that way, and ‘growth’ was, at least in the past, was a dirty word, because growth would mess up the lovely town in which we lived. Of course, in reality, it’s almost exactly the opposite. I had a humorous play on the word ‘profit.’ One of the things that I did, besides run my store, was be active in the community, the life of Oak Ridge. And one of the activities that I had was I served on the Hospital Board for seven years. I had to get off, because you can’t succeed yourself many times. The Oak Ridge Hospital was run by Marshall Whisnant and Stooksbury, and the other names will come back to me, but a wonderful organization. They ran a great hospital. And later, following me, a close friend, Tom Yount, was on the Hospital Board. They came along one year, and it turned out that the revenue exceeded the expense of running the hospital. Well, it was a non-profit organization. What were they going to do? Here they’ve got what is really profit. It’s the revenue exceeding the cost. And so Tom had a brilliant suggestion. He said, “Oh, that’s not profit, that’s provision for progress.” So there was a line in the hospital report, maybe just that one year, ‘provision for progress.’ And it opened my eyes that that’s what really profit is all about. You can’t go ahead. You can’t pay your employees. You can’t grow into a bigger space. You can’t offer a greater variety of goods and services if you don’t make a profit. But for too many years, ‘profit’ was a dirty word. And ‘growth’ is in the same category.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Let’s go back to your business. So you had these businesses in the Downtown Shopping Center. I guess you had a regular clientele, a good customer base?
Mr. Sturm: Yes. That’s a good reminder. In order to appreciate where our customers originated, which neighborhoods and so on, we would a couple of times a year have a registration for a nice prize or a group of prizes. So the customers would, in order to win a prize, would fill out their name and address and drop it in the box. Well, I used to analyze those. And a third of my customers came from Oak Ridge. Two thirds of my customers came from Clinton, well, all the surrounding area: Oliver Springs, Clinton, Wartburg, Knoxville, all around. So your business came from all around, not just Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I grew up in Kingston, and going to Oak Ridge was, for me, like going to the big city.
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. Well, it was to me, too. When you come from Jellico and La Follette, Oak Ridge was a big city.
Mr. McDaniel: I was born in ’57, so I can remember back to the mid ’60s, mid to late ’60s. I remember all four of us kids piling in the car with mom and dad on Friday night to go to Oak Ridge, to eat at Shoney’s and go shopping downtown, you know, at the Downtown Shopping Center.
Mr. Sturm: Talking about eating at Shoney’s, it brings back the memory in 1955 – well, our son was born in 1956, and a daughter in ’58. My son, Bradley, in ’56, my daughter, Diana, in ’58, and my daughter, Michelle, in 1962. When we first moved there, there was the Mayflower Grill, and Grove Center was the – I’m trying to – it was on the second floor of the big building there.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, it was the Oak –
Mr. Sturm: Oak Terrace. They had wonderful biscuits there and wonderful fried chicken. So there was the Oak Terrace and the Mayflower.
Mr. McDaniel: Was the Mayflower the same as the Snow White, or was the Snow White there?
Mr. Sturm: No, Snow White was a small, almost a Krystal-like setup. Then Shoney’s opened. Man, what a treat it was to go to Shoney’s. My kids loved the ice cream – the chocolate cake with the ice cream and the syrup on it, with chocolate syrup on top.
Mr. McDaniel: I remember.
Mr. Sturm: That was a big thrill. And today –
Mr. McDaniel: With a cherry on top.
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. Today, there must be a hundred eating places in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: But I can remember going there, and the whole family, all six of us, could eat for like eight or nine bucks.
Mr. Sturm: Oh, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And my dad – it was so funny, my dad – and I told this story so many times, every time my dad went to Shoney’s – and my dad died about a year and a half ago at the age of ninety-one, and the last time we went to Shoney’s, he was in his, probably, late eighties – I never saw him order anything except for this one thing. For fifty years, he ordered a half-a-pound of ground round at Shoney’s, every time he went, for fifty years. I never saw him order anything else.
Mr. Sturm: Well, I must be of the same school, because today you eat at a lot of different restaurants, but if I eat at the Cracker Barrel, I’ll always have a vegetable plate, and I always have the same four vegetables. Of course, I don’t eat there but maybe once every five or six or seven or eight weeks. Each restaurant I go into, I find one item on the menu I like there and that’s what I order.
Mr. McDaniel: You stick with it.
Mr. Sturm: I used to eat the Slim Jim at Shoney’s.
Mr. McDaniel: I remember that. So you developed your business and you ran your business. Did you retire? I mean, did you just get to a point – what happened?
Mr. Sturm: Well, I reached thirty years in retailing, time in Jellico and then – and I said, “Thirty years is long enough for an engineer to be a retailer,” and I sold my business. I thought I was going to gain a lot of time when I sold my business and got out of retailing. But mysteriously, I didn’t gain a lot of time. And I started thinking, “Why?” I realized that after my business was established, I spent a lot of time in the community. One time, when my grandson, who lives in Evergreen, Colorado, for a maybe junior high project, had to interview someone, and he interviewed me about where was I born, and so on, and where’d I go to school. Later, he had an assignment and he wanted to know, “What have you done for the community?” And so I started writing those things down, and it filled up a full page. So I realized that I didn’t spend all my time – when I was in my business, I wasn’t much of running my business, I was involved in the Chamber, or in Rotary, or the Hospital Board, or High School Advisory Committee, or – it filled up a full page of the kind of things you do in addition to running your own business. And just like Jellico was very receptive, Oak Ridge didn’t have a very large business community. Most of the people who worked in Oak Ridge worked for government. So the retail community is really small in comparison. In fact, probably the second biggest employer is the school system, and then probably the third is the hospital. But then all the other businesses combined don’t employ a huge number of people. Fortunately, people working for the government, many were involved in Oak Ridge activities, but most became involved after they retired from government. Whereas I really was involved during my working years, during the years I was earning a living, I was also doing these other things.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did you sell your – you sold your business.
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And that was before the enclosed mall came around, is that correct?
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. That was before the enclosed mall. What happened was I didn’t really plan to sell my business. A friend who worked for a company in town, worked for ORTEC, said, “Mel, my wife and I would like to have lunch with you one day.” I said, “Fine.” So we met over at the Holiday Inn, and at that time the Holiday Inn had a dining room. They wanted to talk to me about – he says his wife – the children were out of the house, now – she would like to do something, and we were considering – what is your opinion of – we’re thinking about maybe building an office building and renting out office space, and she would run that. I said, “Well, there’s a lot of office buildings. I don’t know, Allen, if I would necessarily do that.” And then, bingo, it hit me. I said, “But how would you like to own a retail store?” And his wife was interested. I put together all the facts and figures and presented it to them, and they bought my business, only I had the wife sit beside my left elbow for six months. I paid her a small salary and she just learned – she’d never run a retail store before, and she learned what it was all about. So she ran it for about two years, and then her husband, who was working for ORTEC, took the job as the president of a small company in California, a start-up company, so the family moved. So she, in turn, sold the business to a second party, who kept it open about eight or nine months and closed it down. And part of it was that when this lady, the one I sold it to, sold it to this second person, she just handed her the keys, and that was it. No training, no background, and you just can’t do that. There’s too many things to learn before you run it. So I was now out of – I was relatively young; I think I was fifty-four when I sold my business. People considered me retired, but I found out I wasn’t retired. Going back to the government disposal of housing and so on, they also had all the vacant land. And they would print a list of properties that were available, and they ranged from a quarter of an acre up to a hundred-and-fifty acres or four hundred acres. I got ahold of one of those bid sheets at one of the auctions, before the auction, and I started thinking, “Well, this looks” – and they had minimum bid prices as well. I said, “This looks interesting.” I think on the first bid round, I bid on three properties, small, you know. I think one was seven acres and one was one acre. You had to put up five percent of the bid price. If you bid a thousand dollars, you know, you had to put up fifty dollars. Then they would have the bid opening and announce the winners. And lo and behold, I got a seven acre tract of land on the west end of town. An interesting coincidence about it is that, although it was just a big field, it had a planned road – the road wasn’t there – and it was called Bradley Avenue. Our first-born son was named Bradley.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: And I subsequently bought the other side of the street for a modest sum. These were all very modest dollars – I didn’t have many dollars – and ended up with, like, fourteen acres, which I built a small sub-division called “The Sturm Addition,” “The Sturm Subdivision.”
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mr. Sturm: That was 1959.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you build the homes?
Mr. Sturm: I built homes there, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you happen to build one that turned into a Presbyterian parsonage, or a Lutheran parsonage?
Mr. Sturm: Well, it could’ve been. I’m not aware of it.
Mr. McDaniel: The reason I say that is I live at 115 Bradley Avenue.
Mr. Sturm: That was my subdivision.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s where I live.
Mr. Sturm: That would be on the left.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s on the left.
Mr. Sturm: Which house?
Mr. McDaniel: It’s the seventh house on the left.
Mr. Sturm: No, I didn’t build that one.
Mr. McDaniel: As you turn down the Turnpike.
Mr. Sturm: Turn off the Turnpike.
Mr. McDaniel: Turn off the Turnpike.
Mr. Sturm: It goes up to Robertsville Road and turns. Well, the property went up and L’d on Robertsville.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s where I am. I’m between the Turnpike and Robertsville Road, on the left.
Mr. Sturm: I think we built either the second and third house on the left, or the third and fourth house on the left.
Mr. McDaniel: From the Turnpike.
Mr. Sturm: From the Turnpike, on the left as you go towards Robertsville. All right, so I went to the bid opening, and to me, it was like Superbowl Day, because these were properties being sold by the government, and I can’t tell you what a feeling it was when I got the property. I really hadn’t looked at it. I just saw it on a plat. I went out and actually stood on the land, and when I stood on the middle of the seven acres that I now owned, on the west end of Oak Ridge, it was just a field; no road was there. I felt like – I never understood the expression about – a woman didn’t feel good, she’d go buy a new hat and feel great. That’s the feeling I had.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: Yes, and a very fortunate thing happened. When I looked at the plat, I saw there were dots and dash marks on it, and I didn’t know what that meant. I was not familiar with the – although an engineer, I was not familiar with land planning. So I asked someone in the city, I said, “What are these dots and dashes here for?” And they said, “Well, this part, this is a sewer line, and this is a water line.” And I said, “Do you mean there’s sewer and water lines there?” They said, “Yeah.” The government had expanded and laid out the infrastructure, but the road had never been built. So I built Bradley Road, and had a subdivision with water and sewer.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Sturm: And the original lots, I think, sold for like fourteen hundred dollars or fifteen hundred dollars each. I think the first house we put on it, a three-bedroom, two-bath house with very good equipment in it, sold for like fifteen-five.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? And what year was this?
Mr. Sturm: 1959. Well, no, it’s probably ’60 or ’61. Interestingly, I didn’t have any experience in building, but I had a friend from the university days, a guy named Ted Daffer, and Ted Daffer achieved a lot of notoriety in college because he was an All-American tackle for the University of Tennessee. Ted had worked for a contracting company called Kenslow in Knoxville, and he wanted to be in business for himself, so we got together, we formed this little company, and Ted and I built The Sturm Addition. I think we built three houses and then moved on to other things.
Mr. McDaniel: So after that, what did you do? Like you said, you were relatively young. You sold your business. You didn’t know what you were going to do with yourself, so you bought this property.
Mr. Sturm: Well, no, I didn’t have any problem, because I was already doing all these things. I mean, I had had this construction company while I was running a store. And I was on these various boards while I was running my store. And I had Kramer Sturm Shoe – well, no, I had sold the business by then to Kramer. He owned – it changed from Kramer Sturm Shoe Store, to just Kramer’s. Could we break just a moment?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, let’s do that.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: Let me just ask you, are there any specific things that really stand out in your mind, as far as the city and the growth of the city or the hindrance to the growth of the city, things such as that, that you were involved in, not only as a business person but also as one of the civic leaders in the town?
Mr. Sturm: Well, earlier I had mentioned the fact that there was disposal, and people were allowed to buy or given the privilege of buying their homes at discounts, and how that was a problem, but we didn’t cover why it was a problem. In order for someone to move into Oak Ridge, since housing was a hundred percent full, there had to be a new unit built, which means there had to be a new lot developed. There were some old interior lots that weren’t used, and they were later used up. And there are still a few today that haven’t been built on. But a developer had to come in and develop the streets, put in the water lines, put in the sewer lines, put in underground electrical at some point. So the price of the lot became more than what just the houses sold for. The people who were fortunate to be buying government housing bought them at greatly reduced prices, but the new resident did not have that privilege. They had to buy a currently priced, built lot. And in the modern era, that’s around fifty thousand dollars, but in – going back into the ’50s and so on, you could develop a lot for four thousand dollars or five thousand dollars. Whereas, all around us, all around Oak Ridge – Knoxville, Kingston, Clinton – you could develop a lot for twelve hundred dollars, because the municipal governments or the county governments were putting in a lot of the infrastructure. In Oak Ridge, the developer had to put the infrastructure in, plus build the street. So a lot at four or five thousand dollars was basically sort of at cost. Then you had to build the house. Well, when minimum wage was forty cents back in the ��40s, I earned seventy-five cents an hour, which was well above minimum wage. Minimum wage was a quarter in 1943, or maybe it had advanced to forty cents by then. But this was now 1960s, and minimum wage was considerably higher. Plus, construction workers in a town like Oak Ridge didn’t earn minimum wage. The machinists, the carpenters, the brick layers, and so on, who worked for government were earning considerably above that. So contractors building houses in Oak Ridge had to come up with those wages. So a fairly modest home in the ’60s would be eighteen thousand dollars, nineteen thousand, compared to people owning homes at four thousand dollars. The income of these two families, one living in World War II Oak Ridge original housing, and now living in new Oak Ridge housing were the same. They were all earning about the same salaries. But this person lived with an appraisal on their home down here. This person, with the same income, lived with an appraisal there, which meant that all city services cost this same income person four times, five times what it cost the person living in government housing. So along comes a city project. Well, we need a new civic center and we’re going to vote whether we’re going to spend that money or not. People who live with good incomes but very low appraisal on their home were all for it, because it wasn’t going to cost them anything, or very little. Whereas the newcomer who earned the same amount of money, who had the same purchasing power as this person living with a low appraisal, had to pay much higher taxes. I remember the battle that we had, the letters that I wrote to the city about garbage collection used to be in the property tax rate. I said, “That’s unfair.” I mean, here’s a good income person living with this appraisal. If you put the garbage collection expense in the tax rate, it doesn’t cost them much. Whereas this family, their garbage pickup costs them a lot, because they’re living in a higher – the term would be the ratio of between income and the appraisal value of your home, that ratio. All newcomers moving into Oak Ridge housing had to pay considerably more for everything than the people who were fortunate to have these homes purchased at very low rates. Every time a vote came up – after all, in the early days, a hundred percent of the people lived in government housing, because government owned everything, but as the town became an independent community, and with property being sold, that wasn’t the case. So at first, only two percent of the people lived outside of government housing, then ten percent, then twenty percent. But the big voting block was down here. And so, yeah, we need a new civic center. Just put it in the tax rate. Same thing for schools: “Oh, we’re all for good schools,” because it wasn’t costing the people who lived in what you refer to as cemestos, or flat-tops, or government housing, former government housing – it wasn’t expensive for them. So it restricted new growth. Do you follow?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Sturm: Did I make that clear?
Mr. McDaniel: No, I understand. Yes, absolutely.
Mr. Sturm: And, to a degree, it still continues, because there’s still a lot of cemesto homes. Of course, the cemestos aren’t appraised anymore. We’ve had reappraisal. So some cemestos get up eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand dollars. But that still is considerably below a new construction.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, two hundred, two-hundred-and-fifty, three-hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars.
Mr. Sturm: I was in Oak Ridge just the other day and I drove through a new development that’s sort of off of Tuskegee Drive. And I drove through some of the new construction. And it was a very modest looking home in a modest street that was priced at three-hundred-and-forty thousand dollars.
Mr. McDaniel: Absolutely.
Mr. Sturm: Well, three-hundred-and-forty thousand dollars sounds like a mansion, you know. This is a very modest three-bedroom home, and on two stories to boot, so it’s really very small, stacked on very small. That person is probably earning no more than the person who’s living in the cemestos, but when the city puts something in the tax rate, it costs them.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Absolutely. Let’s move on. You were mentioning earlier about the vote on the sales tax.
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Talk a little bit about that and the history of that.
Mr. Sturm: Well, again, appraisal of housing comes in. The perfect tax for a person is a tax that raises all the money you need to do the job, but doesn’t cost you anything. An example: Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge, where there’s outlet malls and commercial, commercial, commercial, but the permanent residents is about ten to twenty percent of the population. The perfect tax for Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge is a high sales tax, because it’s being paid for by tourists from all over the world, all over the country. The worst tax for them would – well, that’s the best tax because it raises the money the community needs for all of its infrastructure, its schools, running the maintenance departments and streets, and so on, is paid for by tourists. The local residents don’t pay much. The perfect tax in Oak Ridge for – and going back to the ’60s – for eighty percent of the residents was a property tax, not because the property rate wasn’t pretty high, but their appraisal was very low. So a good tax was a property tax. So when it came up to a sales tax – Oak Ridgers, again, as I mentioned earlier, have a pretty high IQ – it didn’t take them long to figure out if I have a high income, I’m buying more and I’m going to be paying sales tax. But if I finance the same expense through property taxes, it won’t cost me much. So Oak Ridge – not many people would admit this, but they were against the sales tax. But the city needed the revenue. And the first time it came to a vote, it failed.
Mr. McDaniel: About when was that, do you remember?
Mr. Sturm: I’m not remembering the years. And then it went to a second vote and failed. And the third time that it came up, some of the comments that I just made were appreciated, and not only that, but it got to the point where they just had to have more income, and the city voted in a sales tax over the protest of a lot of people. One of the committees I served on was the Superintendent of Schools Advisory Committee, and that sort of got me in trouble because the school system is the main recipient of Oak Ridge property taxes, and I was a known advocate of: “Let’s minimize property taxes, because it’s killing our growth, and let’s find other methods. Let’s find, first, more income through an item like a sales tax.” Of course, as a merchant, a sales tax is sort of punitive, because you spend money collecting that, but you don’t get paid very much for it. You have expense but no revenue. But I was a known advocate of wanting a sales tax, and also to minimize the expense of doing all of the things we do in Oak Ridge, because the high property taxes were keeping people from moving there, or from living there. In one session, the teachers union – the teachers and therefore the union – got very disturbed at my stance or my position, and [there] was talk of boycotting my store. After all, I was selling children’s clothing to kids that were in school. But that didn’t particularly affect my expression of what I really believed. But it was pretty interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Okay, so let’s move on to after you bought that property where Bradley is, and then how long did you stay in Oak Ridge, and when did you move?
Mr. Sturm: Right. I got that in one of the early auctions, but then subsequently there were additional – there would be group blocks of auctions. I remember one time I bid on slightly over a million dollars bidding. These were all sealed bids: you put your bid down, you submit it in an envelope. And I did not have a million dollars to back that up. But I figured that if I were successful in my bidding, that I had, maybe, ten days or something that I could go around east Tennessee and raise the necessary money to buy property. And interestingly, each opening was like Superbowl Day, because it was huge excitement by those who participated, but Oak Ridgers typically weren’t interested. In fact, you know, why would you want to own property in Oak Ridge? So I ended up – was successful in getting a hundred acre tract on the west end of town, and a quarter of an acre here, and a ditch over there, and wetlands over here. In fact, one day, my wife said to me, “You ought to call your real estate activity the ‘S & D Real Estate Company.’” I said, “Sturm – what’s the D stand for? I mean, your name is Francis. I know what the S is, Sturm. And D?” And she said, “Oh, no, not Sturm; it’s Swamps and Ditches.” [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Oh, my.
Mr. Sturm: Because I didn’t have money to bid on.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: So the pieces I bought were not too consequential. But almost without exception, it proved a very right thing to do. One fortuitous thing that happened was, I bought a two-acre tract, and it had gone through many bids and nobody had ever bid on it, and I just bid the minimum price, which was eighteen hundred dollars. It was a two-acre tract on the west end of town. My wife didn’t think it was a good idea, because as wonderful as my wife was, she was conservative also. Then I’m in my store one day, and a man comes in and he says, “You know, I saw on the plat that you’ve got this piece of land out on the west end of town. Would you sell it?” I said, “Yes.” And he says, “Well, what do you want for it?” I said, “Well, I don’t have much of an idea. What do you think you’re willing to pay for it?” He says, “Well, I want to put a small office building there. Would you sell it for seventy-five thousand dollars?” And I gulped, and I said, “No.” I said, ��You can buy it, but I’m not going to sell it to you.” I said, “I’m going to gift it, and you can buy it from the party I gift it to.” So I gave part of it to the Oak Ridge School System and part to the Synagogue, the Jewish Congregation of Oak Ridge that I belonged to. And with the part that went to the Congregation, it acted as the seed money to do an addition to the building. Then the part that went to the school went into a scholarship endowment and this is the thirty-fourth year that we’re awarding scholarships to the Oak Ridge High School that the seniors who enter into competition – one interesting thing that happened in this competition is that, at first, we gave part of the funds based on need, and part based on competition. After a few years, we realized that we were getting a lot more bang for the buck based on competition. The students who got it based upon their financial need and their academics took it casually. It didn’t do anything for them. Those who won it in competition, it gave a huge boost to their self-image. And even if it went to someone whose parents could’ve paid for the same funds, they felt like, “I’m helping.” It sort of affects my attitude towards welfare in general, that if there’s just a handout, it does nothing for self-esteem, where if it’s done based upon being productive, it raises self-esteem. We’re now in our thirty-fourth year, and the total amount that’s been awarded has been a hundred-and-ten thousand dollars. Each year there’s anywhere from three to five winners, so they’re small scholarships, but the long-term impact is good.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Looking back, what would you say your life in Oak Ridge – I mean, your time in Oak Ridge, how did it impact you? How did it impact you personally?
Mr. Sturm: Well, I’m really chauvinistic about Oak Ridge. My wife and I picked Oak Ridge as a place to live over all other places because of the wonderful mix of human beings that were already there when we arrived, people with high character, people who cared about life – so Oak Ridge was a wonderful choice for us, because we were in an environment that had so much to offer, one, good schools. My three children graduated from there, and in the Oak Ridge High School, they were average or maybe a little above average, but not the top students by any means. So just as average students in the Oak Ridge School System, or slightly above average, all three graduated from college with the highest honors, two of the three with highest honors, summa cum laude, and one with cum laude. So the Oak Ridge School System had a powerful impact. Wonderful schools, wonderful human beings. The culture, entertainment, infrastructure, libraries – I mean, I grew up in a town with no public library, and no tennis courts, and no outdoor playing ball fields with lights, and no indoor swimming pool or outdoor swimming pool. Oak Ridge had all the infrastructure. I’ll go back to the growth issue. I’m reminded I had an employee in my store, Dolores, and her husband worked at the plant. Dolores worked in my children’s store. They lived in Oak Ridge, and then she told me that she was going to have to resign because they were moving to Lenoir City – because they couldn’t get the housing they needed in Oak Ridge, so they moved to Lenoir City. I used to do lap swimming for health and because I love the water. One day, a few years later, I’m swimming at the Oak Ridge indoor swimming pool, and I run into Dolores’s husband. And I said, “Well, glad to see you. Why are you over?” He says, “Well, I have a scout troop in Lenoir City, and I brought the kids over to swim in the Oak Ridge Civic Center pool.” Bam, it hit me: they couldn’t afford housing in Oak Ridge because it was expensive in Oak Ridge. The taxes were high because we had indoor swimming pools and playgrounds. They moved to Lenoir City. They don’t pay Oak Ridge taxes, but they come to Oak Ridge for recreation. Not only does he come, but he brings his scout group with him. You know, it’s so subtle some of the mistakes that we make. Oak Ridge has a tuition that if you live in town, you go to school, but if you live in Norris or Clinton and you come to the Oak Ridge school, you have to pay a tuition fee. I’m not sure what it is today, but I think it’s maybe in the four thousand dollar range. It may be slightly higher. But they only pay that for the two or three or four years or six years that their kid is in school. When that kid is not in school, they’re not paying for Oak Ridge schools. So Oak Ridge proved a wonderful environment in which to live. And it was probably one of the best decisions that my wife and I ever made was to live our married life in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: All right, well, thank you so much. I certainly appreciate it. I’m sure we could go on for hours, but –
Mr. Sturm: Oh, I’ll give you the reason why I left Oak Ridge. You never do something, at least I rarely do, or most people don’t, for one reason; it’s an accumulation of reasons. But when our kids were gone to college, gone off to school, not coming back home, I said, “Well, you know, I’d like to live in one more place before we live in a retirement center, or a nursing home.” So we started looking in Oak Ridge to maybe move into a condominium. We went out with one realtor who was developing a site, and he was planning single family homes and then some condos of good quality. It looked pretty good, but then he said, “Well, we’re going to do the houses now, but it’ll be about three years before we start the condominium project.” Well, I was now in my seventies. I didn’t want to – what – the lady who didn’t – she says, “I don’t buy green bananas, you know.” We didn’t want to wait three years. We looked around and we found this lovely spot. We’re sitting on a lake, Fort Loudon Lake, with a boat dock down here. I don’t have any boat anymore, but I used to. I’m eighteen minutes from Oak Ridge, and it was a good move. But there are many reasons why you make a decision like that. And I’m in Oak Ridge often. I still belong to the Rotary Club there, and I get in for meetings, and I go to meet friends, and my wife, who passed away seven years ago, is buried in the cemetery in Oak Ridge, and I go over there, so I still have – and I still belong to my congregation in Oak Ridge. But all in all, it was a brilliant decision to move to Oak Ridge in the first place. And we lived a very – and our children got the very best education. But we, too, have exported them. Two are living in the Denver area, and one lives here in Knoxville.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Mr. Sturm: It was my pleasure.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF MELVIN STURM
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
December 1, 2010
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December the 1st, 2010. And I am with a Mr. Melvin Sturm at his home in Knoxville. Mr. Sturm, thank you for taking time to be with us.
Mr. Sturm: It’s a pleasure. Glad to be here.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back to the beginning. Tell me where were you born and raised, and tell me a little bit about your family.
Mr. Sturm: Well, I was very fortunate. I have a wonderful family. I was born in Appalachia, Virginia in 1923, November 27th, three days ago. My birthday was Saturday. I’m eighty-seven years old. My parents were in the retail business in Appalachia, Virginia. Appalachia was a brand new town. It was founded in 1921, and mainly served the coal mining industry. I was second in line; I had an older brother Howard. And following me, I have a brother, Hiram, who was born two-and-a-half years later, and a brother born three years later, Evan. So there was four Sturm brothers. The only female in our family was our mother.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: Yep.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, where was that in Virginia, what part of Virginia?
Mr. Sturm: Appalachia, Virginia is very near – it’s in Wise County. It’s very near where the state of Tennessee and Virginia and Kentucky meet.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, down near the corner down there.
Mr. Sturm: Yeah, I would say maybe it’s a hundred-and-fifty miles from here.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay.
Mr. Sturm: My father was born in New York City in 1890. My mother was born in 1894, near Vilna, Lithuania, and came to this country when she was about four years old. My father and mother met in Barberville, Kentucky, in 1920. And it was rural, with mountains, and they married after knowing each other for six weeks.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: And along came four sons, and I was number two in the line. And all through high school, we lived in either southern Kentucky, or – I finished high school in La Follette, Tennessee. Then after La Follette High School, I attended University of Tennessee at Knoxville, entered in 1940, graduated in 1944 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and I’ve always thought that east Tennessee is one of the most beautiful spots in the world.
Mr. McDaniel: How did your parents end up in Barberville, Kentucky?
Mr. Sturm: There was a major worldwide flu epidemic in 1917, and my father had a younger sister, and the parents were worried that the flu epidemic was wiping people out right and left. My grandmother had a sister who was already living in Pineville, Kentucky, rural Kentucky, and to perhaps escape the ravages of the flu epidemic, which was wiping out tens of thousands of people, they moved to Pineville, Kentucky and opened a restaurant business and served the railroad crews that were building the railroads through southern Kentucky at that time. Then they stayed. They never went back to New York.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, interesting story, and I’ll interject this: my father was born in 1917, and he got the flu as an infant, and they didn’t expect him to live, but he pulled through it.
Mr. Sturm: Yes, the flu epidemic was – and of course, even today they worry about a new strain of flu, that is not knocked out by the antibodies and the serums, could wipe out a lot of people again.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly.
Mr. Sturm: We hear that talk today.
Mr. McDaniel: So you lived in La Follette, and you went to the University of Tennessee.
Mr. Sturm: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: What year did you graduate?
Mr. Sturm: I graduated in 1944, the class of ’44. I was very fortunate in that I entered college quite young. I was sixteen when I matriculated at the university, and by the time the draft for World War II started, I was already entering my junior year of engineering, so I needed about a year-and-a-half of deferment. And since the country was anxious to have engineers, I had a deferment to finish my last [semester]. So I was able to graduate college before going into service. Immediately upon graduation, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. The Navy is familiar territory to my family, because all four of the sons served in the U.S. Navy, two of us during World War II, two of us during the Korean War.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: So directly out of college, I entered training in Hollywood, Florida, at a training station, was there six months, and shipped out to the Pacific. I had a very fortunate, lucky Navy career the two years that I was in. I was in an officer’s pool at Pearl Harbor awaiting assignment and ended up being assigned to Admiral Halsey’s staff. So I spent my Navy time mostly aboard the USS Missouri, but aboard other combatant ships as well. So I was on Halsey’s staff and had the good fortune to be there for the surrender ceremony.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? What was that like?
Mr. Sturm: Well, many nations were represented by their top ranking military officers. There were Russian officers there and French and British and Australian, and I don’t know, a list of maybe thirty countries. Of course, McArthur was aboard my – Admiral Halsey was there at the signing, standing alongside the table. There was a fly-over of about two thousand planes during this ceremony. It was a momentous occasion.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet.
Mr. Sturm: You know, when I talk about it now, sixty some odd years later, it brings up a lot of emotion. At the time, you know, there wasn’t, and for fifty years – it’s only when the 50th Anniversary came around that people really began to talk about World War II. I had a very good – my duty station was in Flag Plot aboard the USS Missouri, and I had expressed to my senior officer, just senior to me on the staff, that it would be interesting to see what life was like aboard a carrier. He said, “No problem,” and in two days I had orders to go over to Admiral McCain’s staff aboard the carrier Shangri-La. In fact, I was aboard the Shangri-La when they dropped the first nuclear device.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Sturm: Yeah, and of course Admiral McCain was the grandfather of Senator McCain, who just ran for president of the United States. So after the Navy, I spent two years in there, and the war was over, and I drove across the country with a friend who had won – a UT graduate also, who had won a new car. And in 1946, new cars were very hard to come by. He had entered an American Legion raffle and he won this car. Doug and I, Doug Gunn and I, drove across the country, stopped in Chicago. I hadn’t been home yet, and I thought, “You know, I’m an engineer. I think I’ll need a job now that I’m out of service.” I went to an agency, and they sent me to a company called Fairbanks Morrison Company. And we did an interview and they said, “You’re hired. You can go to work tomorrow.” I said, “Wait a minute, I don’t have any clothes. All I’ve got is uniforms, and I haven’t been home, yet.” They said, “Okay, if you work two weeks, we’ll give you a two weeks paid vacation to go home.” So the first two weeks, I worked in a Navy uniform.
Mr. McDaniel: What a wonderful thing to do. And I guess that was 1946?
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: To come back from your service, and drive across the country. I imagine the country was still recovering from the war.
Mr. Sturm: Yes, everything was a shortage. I had a hard time buying clothes, especially a suit. You couldn’t get a car. I mean, they were impossible.
Mr. McDaniel: But I imagine the spirit of America was really at an all-time high, you know.
Mr. Sturm: Oh, yeah. Well, I remember coming home on the – the admiral transferred the staff to the USS South Dakota, a battleship, and we left the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. And we took thirty days to come back to the States. We could’ve done it in half the time, but the ports were so busy on the West Coast receiving military personnel, all coming back to the United States. So we would go two days towards the U.S., and then we’d turn and go back towards Japan for a day. It took thirty days.
Mr. McDaniel: Otherwise, if you got there, you would just have to sit there, wouldn’t you?
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And just wait.
Mr. Sturm: I remember vividly, we were with a group of ships, a small group, and we went under the Golden Gate Bridge, and the fire boats came out and had the water spraying, and people were standing on the Golden Gate Bridge waving, and – very dramatic.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. I imagine at this point in your life, when you think back to those times, think back to those events, those are some once in a lifetime events.
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: As you mentioned, you probably didn’t fully appreciate at the time, but now you do.
Mr. Sturm: Oh, yes. Well, from the vantage point of eighty-seven years, it’s emotional, because – whew, so many guys didn’t do it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, I understand.
Mr. Sturm: So many people didn’t come home.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, I understand.
Mr. Sturm: And yet, you had sixty more years or more of life.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: I recently went back aboard the Missouri. I went on a cruise, and I was in Hawaii, and the Missouri is now a museum in Pearl Harbor. And I purposely wore a cap that I had that had USS Missouri written across it. So I wore it that day. And when the person selling the tickets saw my cap, he said, “Have you ever been aboard the Missouri before?” I said, “Not in sixty years and four months.” His eyes got big.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet.
Mr. Sturm: And he called over to the ship, to the curator of the museum, and they met me at the gang plank, the gang way, and gave me a tour. I wanted to see my old quarters. You know, not everything is open to the public.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Sturm: And they gave me souvenirs and it was fun.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. Okay, so you came back. You drove –
Mr. Sturm: I took a job in engineering.
Mr. McDaniel: You took a job as an engineer. You worked there for two weeks, and then you had a two week paid vacation.
Mr. Sturm: That’s right.
Mr. McDaniel: And was that in Chicago? Was that job in Chicago?
Mr. Sturm: The job was in Chicago. Their factory was in Beloit, Wisconsin, which I visited on several occasions, but my job was in downtown Chicago. And it was a great opportunity, because Northwestern University had a downtown campus. For about a year and a half, I lived in a dormitory, in a high-rise dorm building in downtown Chicago on Lake Michigan, and used to have breakfast every morning, and you’d see the limos going by with people that – the owners sitting in the back reading the paper. And I thought, “Well, one day I’d like to do that.” But Chicago is a great city, and I lived there three years. I was also in the Naval Reserve there. I went to night school at Northwestern and took all the kind of courses that engineers don’t get to take, like music appreciation, and law, and art, and etymology, and just all the kind of things that – music – that engineers don’t have time for when you’re in a regular curriculum. I was working for Fairbanks Morris. It was my third year there, and – oh, incidentally, I should mention that the – so others nowadays might appreciate – my starting salary was a hundred-and-eighty-five dollars a month, which was ten dollars higher than they were paying the other engineers that were in there, the young new engineers, so my beginning salary was a hundred-and-eighty-five dollars a month, and I could do anything I wanted to with all that money.
Mr. McDaniel: That was pretty good pay back then, wasn’t it?
Mr. Sturm: That was good pay.
Mr. McDaniel: When you left the service, how much were you making in the service?
Mr. Sturm: I think as a Lieutenant JG I was getting maybe like a hundred-and-sixty-five dollars a month. Somewhere in the hundred-and-thirty-five, hundred-and-sixty-five, of which a third of it went to buy U.S. war bonds, because that was patriotic, you know. So when I was in the service, about a third of my salary was going to buy U.S. savings bonds. Many years later I realized if I’d have put that money into the stock market instead of U.S. savings bonds, it would’ve been a different story.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: I got a call one day that my father had been in an automobile accident in which he lost his life, and I came back to Tennessee. My father had bought a business in Jellico, Tennessee in January. In April, the accident happened. He was on a civic mission for the town of Jellico. A little background on that – Grace Moore, the opera star, was born in Jellico. The University of Tennessee had a memorial concert, and there was a cavalcade that went over from Jellico to Knoxville to attend this event. And on the way back – well, and my father hadn’t planned to go, but they came to him and asked him, “There’s two teenage girls, high schoolers, who would like to go to the concert and don’t have a ride.” He said, “Well, I’ll do that.” And on the way home from that concert, a delivery truck –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, hold on just a second. I think your microphone has come loose. I’ll get you to tell that story.
Mr. Sturm: This is far afield from Oak Ridge, though.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. This is all background information. It’s good to know. We’re not just interested in Oak Ridge, we’re interested in you. I’m going to redo this a little bit.
Mr. Sturm: Is the mic okay, now?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, it’s good. So your father had gone –
Mr. Sturm: So my – went to the concert. In fact, there was a picture in the News Sentinel the next day showing the Jellico contingency of about a hundred-and-some-odd people. And my father’s picture with those two girls that were riding with him was in the News Sentinel. On the way home, about eleven o’clock p.m. at night, very near Lake City, a delivery man who had stopped, I think, at every beer tavern on the way back to Knoxville, it was like eleven-something in the evening, and he came around a curve. My father saw the truck coming. The truck didn’t make the curve. He was drunk. He just plowed directly into my father’s car. He survived for about six hours and expired.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Sturm: And he had bought this business – it was a general clothing store in Jellico – in January. This is four months later. So of the four sons, one was still on active duty in the Navy, one was in med school, and my other brother was also in the Navy. It seemed like – I took a leave of absence from my company for three months to close up the business, pay off the creditors, and return to Chicago. Well, it wasn’t that simple. So I took another three months leave of absence, and about the fourth month I realized, you know, I think this business is making a profit, because I’m able to pay the bank a thousand dollars a month on the notes. And I was in charge. It was going to take me ten more years in engineering to get up to the same level of income and maybe responsibility. Plus, my mother needed me, and so a mechanical engineer left engineering and became a retailer.
Mr. McDaniel: What was that, about 1950?
Mr. Sturm: That was 1949. I’d been in Chicago since ’46. And I enjoyed retailing. Jellico’s a town of – a population of 2,602 when I was there. I don’t think it’s much more today.
Mr. McDaniel: So you knew everybody, didn’t you?
Mr. Sturm: But in a small town, there are no young people. I mean, they graduate from high school and then there’s very few jobs. It’s typical of all small towns: they invest in their young people, and the moment they graduate from high school, they export them to some other community. And it’s really tough. One of the things I’m most proud of and one of the things I’m very proud of in living is that I grew up in a small town. When I was in Chicago, you would meet people, and they would immediately call you – “Where are you from?” “Tennessee.” “Oh, you’re a hillbilly. You’re wearing shoes,” you know.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mr. Sturm: And they didn’t know that, inside, my feeling was exactly the reverse. I was extremely proud to have been raised in a small town in east Tennessee, and I called them ‘citybillies.’ I wasn’t a hillbilly; they were ‘citybillies.’
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: So I ended up staying in retailing. After about six years, I met a wonderful young lady from Chattanooga by the name of Francis Alper. We courted, we wed, but I knew that I couldn’t take a bride back and keep her in Jellico where there were no young people. I started to comment earlier that a small town embraced a young college graduate. Let’s see, I was twenty-six years old, and they just were very happy to have a young person in town. I lived there six years. I ended up forming a Chamber of Commerce, joined Kiwanis; I was President of Kiwanis. I served on a three-man utility board. They convinced me that I ought to run for City Council, and I was Commissioner of Finance for two years. Then they came to me and said, “Mel, we want you to run for Mayor.” I said, “I don’t plan to do that.” And they said, “Well, you don’t have to do anything, just let us put your name up.” And I said, “Okay.” I was elected and I served a term as mayor of Jellico. Mind you, I was in my late twenties. So I married this lovely girl, Fran Alper, and I brought her to Jellico. When her parents visited – when we announced our engagement – this is in Chattanooga – and we’re at my mother’s home on Cumberland Avenue in Jellico, Fran’s mother took her aside and said, “You must really love him to come,” so I knew that we weren’t going to stay there. When my brother got out of the Navy, I sort of turned the business over to him and opened a retail business in Oak Ridge. And why Oak Ridge? Well, we considered many places. We knew people in Memphis and Nashville and Atlanta and Chattanooga, and I said, “No, let’s move to Oak Ridge.” And a friend was opening a shopping center, later to be called the Downtown Shopping Center, and I went to him and I said, “I’d like to open a retail store in your new center,” so I’d be able to support myself and my wife and we could live in Oak Ridge. And he said, “Well, what kind of business do you want?” I said, “Well, I think maybe a” – my business in Jellico was generally apparel, men’s, women’s, children’s, linoleum, rugs, you name it, piece goods. He said, “We don’t need a men’s store. We’ve got this one and this one.” And I said, “Well, perhaps I’ll open a ladies’ shop.” He said, “We don’t need one, we’ve got this one.” I said, “Well, what kind of store do you need in your shopping center?” He said, “We don’t have a children’s store.” I said, “Okay.” [laughter] But I didn’t do it that casually, because I had done some research, and I discovered that Oak Ridge, at that time, had one of the highest birthrates in the nation. In 1950 – this is now 1955 – there was about a thousand infants born in Oak Ridge every year.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Sturm: And because the population – I should back up to my first work in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, please.
Mr. Sturm: I was between my junior and senior year in engineering school in Knoxville, and I was on an accelerated program in order to graduate before I went into the service, so I had about a six-week break between my summer quarter and the beginning of the fall semester quarter, and I applied for a job in Oak Ridge. It was employing, what, seventy-five thousand people. And sure enough, they had a job, even a short term job, for me. I signed on as a timekeeper in a welding shop, what is now K-25, and I got paid seventy-five cents an hour, which in 1943 was a lot of money. And it was aided by the fact that we worked a fifty hour week instead of a forty hour week, so I got time-and-a-half. I felt rich.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. When you worked there, were you living in Knoxville?
Mr. Sturm: No, I was living at home with my parents. Out of school, I didn’t have accommodations at the university. I was living in La Follette. I would get up at four o’clock in the morning, I’d walk downtown where a gentleman lived at the Russell Hotel, I’d join up with him, and we’d drive to Oak Ridge to get to work on time. And when my ten hour shift was over, we’d drive back to La Follette. So I’d get up at four o’clock in the morning, and it was frequently six or seven o’clock in the evening before I would get back home for dinner. Then you’d go to bed and you’d go back. That was for six weeks and I loved it.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Sturm: I had money. You know, when I entered college in 1944, we were – in 1940, we were in a different economy than we are today. Minimum wage was a quarter. An amusing thing happened recently –
Mr. McDaniel: But a loaf of bread was ten cents, or something like that, so there’s –
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. Oh, I mean, if the telephone bill was more than two-and-a-quarter, two dollars and twenty-five cents, my father wanted to know what happened. And today, people with their cell phones, and multiple cell phones for a family, people have two-hundred-dollar-a-month phone bills today. So after school took session, I came back to the university and finished my senior year. But Oak Ridge, I remember the Turnpike was gravel and dirt, and the Central Bus Station was extremely active. In that era, I think the workforce was about seventy to seventy-five thousand. Well, Oak Ridge only housed maybe – with dormitories and flat-tops and so on – maybe housed, I don’t know, maybe thirty thousand.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, thirty, forty thousand, something like that.
Mr. Sturm: Yeah, which meant all the rest of the workforce had to commute. And people commuted from distant – well, La Follette was about an hour-and-a-half, hour and thirty minute drive, maybe, in those days, because after all, there were no interstates, two-lane roads packed with cars. You had ration cards to get gasoline.
Mr. McDaniel: So you had fond memories of Oak Ridge.
Mr. Sturm: Oh, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So when you were thinking about where to go, you had –
Mr. Sturm: Well, what I knew of Oak Ridge, the big attraction to me, as a young newlywed, was the amazing population of Oak Ridge. I mean, it had young men and women from all over the world. Well, all over the United States, and from the world as well. I’m sorry, in 1943, it was U.S. citizens. But when I moved there in 1955, it was citizens of the world. And to illustrate what it was to live in Oak Ridge at that time, in 1955-56, I used to go on buying trips to New York to buy for my children’s store, and I remember one occasion the owner of this manufacturing company came in just to chat with his customers. I was writing order and he saw that I was having it shipped to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He said, “Oak Ridge?” He said, “I’ve heard of Oak Ridge. Isn’t that a nuclear town?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How big is Oak Ridge?” I said, “To me, Oak Ridge is a population of about a million people.” He said, “Oh, I didn’t know it was that big.” “Oh,” I said, “no, the actual population is about twenty-nine thousand.” I said, “But to me,” and see, at that time, I was thirty-two years old – see, Oak Ridge was farmland, and then it brought all these young scientists in, and young people to do the job, and I figured that I would have to live in a city of a million population to have twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand people who were around my age, around my educational background, around my income level, around my background level.
Mr. McDaniel: Who had culture and all the artistic endeavors that were going on in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Sturm: Well, and you had character. These people – well, one thing, they had all been cleared by the FBI. [laughter] When I was in business, someone in Knoxville asked me, “How can you go open a business in a one industry town? Because if that industry goes out of business, everything you’ve invested is gone.” I said, “Well, it’s true. Typically, you don’t go into business in a one industry town.” I said, “But this industry is nuclear.” I said, “It’s going to be here a long time.” Well, there are plenty of stories about people – the people who came to Oak Ridge thought they were coming for a year, two years, three years, then they were going to go back home. Well, they stayed.
Mr. McDaniel: And there are thousands of people in Oak Ridge today who came for a year or two, and they’ve been here for fifty or sixty years.
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. Unfortunately, too many of those are going to the great beyond. And it’s one of the things that I worked on pretty hard was finding a way to make Oak Ridge a viable community for a long number of years, because it started there with a bulge of population. Everybody was twenty-five to thirty-five years old. I mean, someone fifty was an old person in 1943.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So you opened your business. And what was the name of your business?
Mr. Sturm: The name was Sturm’s Youth World.
Mr. McDaniel: And it was in the Downtown Shopping Center.
Mr. Sturm: It was in the Downtown Shopping Center. Before that, to test the waters of what it would be like to be in business in Oak Ridge, a friend that I knew had married a college friend of mine and classmate of mine – his name was Homer Kramer – he married a young woman that I knew well, Genevieve Shaw, now Genevieve Shaw Kramer. Homer was working as an auditor for the Department of Energy, but he wanted to be in the retail business and had had a job part-time at Sears. So together, we opened a shoe store. It was called Kramer Sturm Shoe Store. There was no Downtown at that time. Every space was government owned. And he sub-leased a space in what was called the Winder Building. It was the building – The Oak Ridger was at the other end of that building, in those days, and I think it was on Tyrone Road, very close to Jackson Square. We opened that business, and then when the Downtown Shopping Center was available, we moved the store into the Downtown Shopping Center. It was Kramer Sturm Shoe Store. My store was called Sturm’s Youth World. Then later, I added – you know, one thing about a children’s store is, no matter how well you service your customers –
Mr. McDaniel: They grow up.
Mr. Sturm: They outgrow you, so you have to keep cultivating new customers. It’s not like if you had a men’s store. I mean, a person starts wearing adult clothes, male adult clothes maybe at age sixteen or seventeen, and then for the rest of their lives you keep them as a customer. You don’t do that with children. But it was a fun business to be in.
Mr. McDaniel: So you opened another store?
Mr. Sturm: Well, I opened up Sturm’s Youth World. And then, as my customers grew, I opened up a store called Backstage. And Backstage catered to young, pre-teen girls.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Was that at the Downtown Shopping Center as well?
Mr. Sturm: That was also in the Downtown – and the reason we called it Backstage is that you could enter through my children’s store, and then a space became available – there was a – I think, Argonne Plaza – there was a plaza to the right of my store. There was my store, there was Bank of Oak Ridge was next to me on one side, and the other was McCrory’s. And then there was – Kimball Jewelry, I believe was there. It’s still a jewelry store, I think.
Mr. McDaniel: There was a breezeway right there.
Mr. Sturm: It was Argonne Plaza.
Mr. McDaniel: Argonne Plaza, that’s right.
Mr. Sturm: Named after another nuclear site.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, of course.
Mr. Sturm: And there was a space – there was a barbershop back there, and there was a restaurant – there was a deli. And the deli moved out and that space was available. So you could enter Backstage off of Argonne Plaza, or you could enter through the Youth World on the main street.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. What year did you open Backstage?
Mr. Sturm: Well, it must’ve been maybe ’65, 1965 maybe, right in there. That was a fun enterprise. Oak Ridge was a great place to do business. I mean, first place, if you lived in – I remember in rural Tennessee, you live in a small town in Tennessee, the customer wasn’t going to buy something, they didn’t want to hurt your feelings, and they’d say, “I’ll be back.” They never saw them again.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: In Oak Ridge, it was different. A customer – the wife would come in and look at children’s apparel, and she says, “Well, I’ll be back.” Well, she would. She’d come and bring the child after school, and they would try on clothes. And then she might say – still not buy it, says, “I’ll be back,” and she’d bring the husband down to approve the purchase. So in Oak Ridge, when they said, “I’ll be back,” they meant it.
Mr. McDaniel: They meant it and came back.
Mr. Sturm: It wasn’t an excuse to leave the store.
Mr. McDaniel: Now let me go back just a minute. You said a friend of yours was going to open that Downtown Shopping Center. That was Gilford Glazer?
Mr. Sturm: Gilford Glazer, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: How did you know him?
Mr. Sturm: Well, Gilford also went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He wasn’t in school when I was, but I knew the Glazer family. I knew Jerome, his brother, younger brother, and I knew Louis, his older brother. Those three formed a construction company. Their first project was Shelbourne Towers in Knoxville. It was a large – it was the largest residential apartment building in Knoxville. Then Gilford negotiated with the government. When I moved to Oak Ridge, government owned everything, every school, every business location, every residential location. The government built the hospital. And it wasn’t until – let’s see, when Oak Ridge incorporated –
Mr. McDaniel: In 1959.
Mr. Sturm: Well, I know they sold the property in ’59, but they incorporated as a town –
Mr. McDaniel: They had voted to incorporate in 1959, and it was July 1st, 1960 is when the keys were turned over to the –
Mr. Sturm: Well, I can remember, I was still living in Jellico, and there was a – what was the name, the Oak Ridge Community Council or something?
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: Before there was a –
Mr. McDaniel: Before the City Council.
Mr. Sturm: I remember Bob McNeese was, perhaps, Chairman of that. And somehow or other, before even moving here, I knew Bob, and I was invited to sit in on that Council. I wasn’t a member of the Council, but I was invited to be there and sit in on the Town Council meetings.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. They opened the gates in 1949, and then it took them ten years to be able to incorporate. So that’s when the vote happened, in 1959. I did a documentary on that a couple of years ago. But that’s when it happened. So up until then – but the housing started being transferred around the mid ’50s. That’s when they started –
Mr. Sturm: I would say ’57.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, it was that time.
Mr. Sturm: Because I can remember disposal – well touching on that subject –
Mr. McDaniel: The disposal bill – sure.
Mr. Sturm: I can remember when they offered – the government owned everything, and they offered the occupants of houses and of businesses the opportunity to buy their house. The mood was, ‘Well, I’m going to go back to Ohio, or Indiana, or New York.’ And there was a fifteen percent – the government appraised everything, and they offered an incentive of fifteen percent below the appraisal price if you were the resident and would buy your house. They would give you another ten percent off, a total of twenty-five percent, if you waived the employment agreement. They had an agreement that, at the fifteen percent off level, that if the employment fell – I don’t know – below a certain level, that they would take the house back.
Mr. McDaniel: They’d take the house back, right.
Mr. Sturm: But if you – but for another ten percent, you waived that. And I think most people – Oak Ridgers had fairly high IQs. They all figured out – I won’t say they all did.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Well, most of the people did. I have a good friend who bought his house. It wasn’t a “D”, it was maybe an “F” house. I mean, it was a large house.
Mr. Sturm: Well, “F” was the largest.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, I think it was an “F” house, for like –
Mr. Sturm: There was a “B”, “C”, “D”, “E”, and “F”.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, for like thirty-two hundred dollars, or something like that, in the mid ’50s.
Mr. Sturm: Yeah. I’ll digress to say that that proved to be one of Oak Ridge’s major economic problems is the fact that a very expensive – when the government appraised them, people – I think the top appraisal was from the range of maybe five thousand dollars. That’s for the best house on the best lot. And others sold in the range of twenty-eight hundred to thirty-three hundred. In fact, I still have the newspapers that listed all of the houses and what they sold for. That proved to be a real problem later, because the housing was a hundred percent occupied. There was no spare housing. So if someone got a job in Oak Ridge, there was no place to live. When I moved to Oak Ridge in 1955, forty-three percent of the Department of Energy workforce lived in Oak Ridge, which meant fifty-seven percent, more than half, lived out of Oak Ridge. And I said, “What a wonderful opportunity,” because the minute you build housing, we’re going to gain a lot of population. And if people work here, they don��t want to live someplace else. But Oak Ridge had one of the first planning commissions in this whole region. And in the wisdom of the planning commission, they put down a lot of roadblocks for building new housing, so new housing didn’t materialize very quick. But after disposal, large tracts of land were available. Groups bought them, individuals bought them and started developing lots. But the development restrictions were difficult. Not only were they difficult, but they were implemented in a rigid manner.
Mr. McDaniel: I think that’s not changed in fifty years, either.
Mr. Sturm: It has not changed in fifty years. I’ll jump ahead to say that I was at a Rotary Club meeting in Oak Ridge, and Sam Sapirie, who was head of the Atomic Energy Commission in Oak Ridge, he was now the top administrator for the government, and Sam made a talk at Rotary, and he said, “The Atomic Energy Commission is closing a facility out west, and it’s going to create about two thousand new jobs in Oak Ridge in the next two years.” I left that meeting and I went back to my retail store, and I sat at my desk and I said, “But Oak Ridge has a hundred percent occupancy, the equivalent of a hundred percent occupancy of all of its housing. Where are these two thousand new jobs going to live?” And then I realized – I looked at building. We were building about ten houses a month, a hundred-and-twenty a year. We’re going to get a thousand jobs for two years. Anyway, I calculated we’re going to house fourteen percent of those workers, maximum. So I started thinking about this more, and I wrote out a speech. I made a speech at Rotary about the housing crisis, that we have a crisis in housing, that we’ve got two thousand employees coming here, and these are not your typical minimum wage jobs, and these people who are going to come here are mostly going to be college graduates. They’re going to have wives who are college graduates. We need those people living in Oak Ridge. This is like 1968, 1969. So I started speaking out, and as a member of the Chamber of Commerce, a man named Herm Snyder and I wrote a book called, “The Housing Study of 19[70],” published in 1970. I was working full-time in my retail business, and retailing is not engineering where you work thirty-seven to forty hours a week. In retailing those days, I was working sixty and seventy hours a week. But whatever spare time, I would go to the Oak Ridge [Public] Library or to the Chamber of Commerce and sit and write. And we produced this housing study, which is still around. It’s about a half inch thick bound volume, and it covered everything about the demographics of the community, the school population, the policies of development, how our taxes were, and we produced this study. Unfortunately, when it was given to City Council, and when the Chamber of Commerce presented it to City Council – in fact, I came across a picture the other day of me handing the study, Les Dale and I – Les was President of the Chamber of Commerce – handed the report to, I think, Hardy. I’m not remembering his first name, John Hardy, maybe? Anyway, we were presenting it to him. There’s a picture that was in the paper. Well, unfortunately, it was taken as criticism. The study, which pointed out the parameters of what was going on in Oak Ridge was taken by City Council and Planning Commission as criticism, which it was the last thing in our mind to be critical. What we were doing is trying to point out the situation, and to try to do something about it, improve the regulations and the framework for development in Oak Ridge. And unfortunately, it didn’t move many people. But since then, one of the thoughts that occurred to me, and it was a wartime thought, there was the expression, “point of no return.” What that referred to was you would send a bomber patrol, a bomber group out on a bombing mission. Well, they only had so much fuel, and if they got beyond – if they used up half of their fuel and went beyond that, there was no way to get back home, and my thought at that time was that if Oak Ridge continues on the path we were on, of denying people the opportunity to live in the community, not openly, but by not providing housing, that we would one day go beyond the point of no return. And our work on the housing study was to try to prevent that.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So what were the ramifications for you, personally, or for your business after that? Or did people generally support the housing study, I mean, as far as the business community and civic leaders?
Mr. Sturm: Well, it just got buried. And it wasn’t my personal nature to cram something down someone’s throat. You know, you lay it out, here it is, this is the picture, and it’s up to you to do something with it. I was in no frame of mind to try to impose the thinking on other people. And after all, Oak Ridge is full of very bright people. One of the reactions was ‘growth is bad,’ because growth meant there’d be more cars on the Turnpike, there’d be more kids in the classroom, and it would be a burden. And in fact, Oak Ridge also had – you know, I was a retailer, and if I didn’t make a profit, I didn’t have a salary. And I couldn’t expand or grow my business. So retailers have to make a profit. Well, in Oak Ridge, where everyone was employed by government, ‘profit’ was not a nice word. When you said the word ‘profit’ in Oak Ridge, it meant too much profit, excessive, gouging. What profit really means, it gives you the strength, the vigor, to be better tomorrow. But it isn’t heard that way, and ‘growth’ was, at least in the past, was a dirty word, because growth would mess up the lovely town in which we lived. Of course, in reality, it’s almost exactly the opposite. I had a humorous play on the word ‘profit.’ One of the things that I did, besides run my store, was be active in the community, the life of Oak Ridge. And one of the activities that I had was I served on the Hospital Board for seven years. I had to get off, because you can’t succeed yourself many times. The Oak Ridge Hospital was run by Marshall Whisnant and Stooksbury, and the other names will come back to me, but a wonderful organization. They ran a great hospital. And later, following me, a close friend, Tom Yount, was on the Hospital Board. They came along one year, and it turned out that the revenue exceeded the expense of running the hospital. Well, it was a non-profit organization. What were they going to do? Here they’ve got what is really profit. It’s the revenue exceeding the cost. And so Tom had a brilliant suggestion. He said, “Oh, that’s not profit, that’s provision for progress.” So there was a line in the hospital report, maybe just that one year, ‘provision for progress.’ And it opened my eyes that that’s what really profit is all about. You can’t go ahead. You can’t pay your employees. You can’t grow into a bigger space. You can’t offer a greater variety of goods and services if you don’t make a profit. But for too many years, ‘profit’ was a dirty word. And ‘growth’ is in the same category.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Let’s go back to your business. So you had these businesses in the Downtown Shopping Center. I guess you had a regular clientele, a good customer base?
Mr. Sturm: Yes. That’s a good reminder. In order to appreciate where our customers originated, which neighborhoods and so on, we would a couple of times a year have a registration for a nice prize or a group of prizes. So the customers would, in order to win a prize, would fill out their name and address and drop it in the box. Well, I used to analyze those. And a third of my customers came from Oak Ridge. Two thirds of my customers came from Clinton, well, all the surrounding area: Oliver Springs, Clinton, Wartburg, Knoxville, all around. So your business came from all around, not just Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I grew up in Kingston, and going to Oak Ridge was, for me, like going to the big city.
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. Well, it was to me, too. When you come from Jellico and La Follette, Oak Ridge was a big city.
Mr. McDaniel: I was born in ’57, so I can remember back to the mid ’60s, mid to late ’60s. I remember all four of us kids piling in the car with mom and dad on Friday night to go to Oak Ridge, to eat at Shoney’s and go shopping downtown, you know, at the Downtown Shopping Center.
Mr. Sturm: Talking about eating at Shoney’s, it brings back the memory in 1955 – well, our son was born in 1956, and a daughter in ’58. My son, Bradley, in ’56, my daughter, Diana, in ’58, and my daughter, Michelle, in 1962. When we first moved there, there was the Mayflower Grill, and Grove Center was the – I’m trying to – it was on the second floor of the big building there.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, it was the Oak –
Mr. Sturm: Oak Terrace. They had wonderful biscuits there and wonderful fried chicken. So there was the Oak Terrace and the Mayflower.
Mr. McDaniel: Was the Mayflower the same as the Snow White, or was the Snow White there?
Mr. Sturm: No, Snow White was a small, almost a Krystal-like setup. Then Shoney’s opened. Man, what a treat it was to go to Shoney’s. My kids loved the ice cream – the chocolate cake with the ice cream and the syrup on it, with chocolate syrup on top.
Mr. McDaniel: I remember.
Mr. Sturm: That was a big thrill. And today –
Mr. McDaniel: With a cherry on top.
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. Today, there must be a hundred eating places in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: But I can remember going there, and the whole family, all six of us, could eat for like eight or nine bucks.
Mr. Sturm: Oh, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And my dad – it was so funny, my dad – and I told this story so many times, every time my dad went to Shoney’s – and my dad died about a year and a half ago at the age of ninety-one, and the last time we went to Shoney’s, he was in his, probably, late eighties – I never saw him order anything except for this one thing. For fifty years, he ordered a half-a-pound of ground round at Shoney’s, every time he went, for fifty years. I never saw him order anything else.
Mr. Sturm: Well, I must be of the same school, because today you eat at a lot of different restaurants, but if I eat at the Cracker Barrel, I’ll always have a vegetable plate, and I always have the same four vegetables. Of course, I don’t eat there but maybe once every five or six or seven or eight weeks. Each restaurant I go into, I find one item on the menu I like there and that’s what I order.
Mr. McDaniel: You stick with it.
Mr. Sturm: I used to eat the Slim Jim at Shoney’s.
Mr. McDaniel: I remember that. So you developed your business and you ran your business. Did you retire? I mean, did you just get to a point – what happened?
Mr. Sturm: Well, I reached thirty years in retailing, time in Jellico and then – and I said, “Thirty years is long enough for an engineer to be a retailer,” and I sold my business. I thought I was going to gain a lot of time when I sold my business and got out of retailing. But mysteriously, I didn’t gain a lot of time. And I started thinking, “Why?” I realized that after my business was established, I spent a lot of time in the community. One time, when my grandson, who lives in Evergreen, Colorado, for a maybe junior high project, had to interview someone, and he interviewed me about where was I born, and so on, and where’d I go to school. Later, he had an assignment and he wanted to know, “What have you done for the community?” And so I started writing those things down, and it filled up a full page. So I realized that I didn’t spend all my time – when I was in my business, I wasn’t much of running my business, I was involved in the Chamber, or in Rotary, or the Hospital Board, or High School Advisory Committee, or – it filled up a full page of the kind of things you do in addition to running your own business. And just like Jellico was very receptive, Oak Ridge didn’t have a very large business community. Most of the people who worked in Oak Ridge worked for government. So the retail community is really small in comparison. In fact, probably the second biggest employer is the school system, and then probably the third is the hospital. But then all the other businesses combined don’t employ a huge number of people. Fortunately, people working for the government, many were involved in Oak Ridge activities, but most became involved after they retired from government. Whereas I really was involved during my working years, during the years I was earning a living, I was also doing these other things.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, did you sell your – you sold your business.
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And that was before the enclosed mall came around, is that correct?
Mr. Sturm: That’s right. That was before the enclosed mall. What happened was I didn’t really plan to sell my business. A friend who worked for a company in town, worked for ORTEC, said, “Mel, my wife and I would like to have lunch with you one day.” I said, “Fine.” So we met over at the Holiday Inn, and at that time the Holiday Inn had a dining room. They wanted to talk to me about – he says his wife – the children were out of the house, now – she would like to do something, and we were considering – what is your opinion of – we’re thinking about maybe building an office building and renting out office space, and she would run that. I said, “Well, there’s a lot of office buildings. I don’t know, Allen, if I would necessarily do that.” And then, bingo, it hit me. I said, “But how would you like to own a retail store?” And his wife was interested. I put together all the facts and figures and presented it to them, and they bought my business, only I had the wife sit beside my left elbow for six months. I paid her a small salary and she just learned – she’d never run a retail store before, and she learned what it was all about. So she ran it for about two years, and then her husband, who was working for ORTEC, took the job as the president of a small company in California, a start-up company, so the family moved. So she, in turn, sold the business to a second party, who kept it open about eight or nine months and closed it down. And part of it was that when this lady, the one I sold it to, sold it to this second person, she just handed her the keys, and that was it. No training, no background, and you just can’t do that. There’s too many things to learn before you run it. So I was now out of – I was relatively young; I think I was fifty-four when I sold my business. People considered me retired, but I found out I wasn’t retired. Going back to the government disposal of housing and so on, they also had all the vacant land. And they would print a list of properties that were available, and they ranged from a quarter of an acre up to a hundred-and-fifty acres or four hundred acres. I got ahold of one of those bid sheets at one of the auctions, before the auction, and I started thinking, “Well, this looks” – and they had minimum bid prices as well. I said, “This looks interesting.” I think on the first bid round, I bid on three properties, small, you know. I think one was seven acres and one was one acre. You had to put up five percent of the bid price. If you bid a thousand dollars, you know, you had to put up fifty dollars. Then they would have the bid opening and announce the winners. And lo and behold, I got a seven acre tract of land on the west end of town. An interesting coincidence about it is that, although it was just a big field, it had a planned road – the road wasn’t there – and it was called Bradley Avenue. Our first-born son was named Bradley.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: And I subsequently bought the other side of the street for a modest sum. These were all very modest dollars – I didn’t have many dollars – and ended up with, like, fourteen acres, which I built a small sub-division called “The Sturm Addition,” “The Sturm Subdivision.”
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mr. Sturm: That was 1959.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you build the homes?
Mr. Sturm: I built homes there, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you happen to build one that turned into a Presbyterian parsonage, or a Lutheran parsonage?
Mr. Sturm: Well, it could’ve been. I’m not aware of it.
Mr. McDaniel: The reason I say that is I live at 115 Bradley Avenue.
Mr. Sturm: That was my subdivision.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s where I live.
Mr. Sturm: That would be on the left.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s on the left.
Mr. Sturm: Which house?
Mr. McDaniel: It’s the seventh house on the left.
Mr. Sturm: No, I didn’t build that one.
Mr. McDaniel: As you turn down the Turnpike.
Mr. Sturm: Turn off the Turnpike.
Mr. McDaniel: Turn off the Turnpike.
Mr. Sturm: It goes up to Robertsville Road and turns. Well, the property went up and L’d on Robertsville.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, that’s where I am. I’m between the Turnpike and Robertsville Road, on the left.
Mr. Sturm: I think we built either the second and third house on the left, or the third and fourth house on the left.
Mr. McDaniel: From the Turnpike.
Mr. Sturm: From the Turnpike, on the left as you go towards Robertsville. All right, so I went to the bid opening, and to me, it was like Superbowl Day, because these were properties being sold by the government, and I can’t tell you what a feeling it was when I got the property. I really hadn’t looked at it. I just saw it on a plat. I went out and actually stood on the land, and when I stood on the middle of the seven acres that I now owned, on the west end of Oak Ridge, it was just a field; no road was there. I felt like – I never understood the expression about – a woman didn’t feel good, she’d go buy a new hat and feel great. That’s the feeling I had.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Sturm: Yes, and a very fortunate thing happened. When I looked at the plat, I saw there were dots and dash marks on it, and I didn’t know what that meant. I was not familiar with the – although an engineer, I was not familiar with land planning. So I asked someone in the city, I said, “What are these dots and dashes here for?” And they said, “Well, this part, this is a sewer line, and this is a water line.” And I said, “Do you mean there’s sewer and water lines there?” They said, “Yeah.” The government had expanded and laid out the infrastructure, but the road had never been built. So I built Bradley Road, and had a subdivision with water and sewer.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Sturm: And the original lots, I think, sold for like fourteen hundred dollars or fifteen hundred dollars each. I think the first house we put on it, a three-bedroom, two-bath house with very good equipment in it, sold for like fifteen-five.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? And what year was this?
Mr. Sturm: 1959. Well, no, it’s probably ’60 or ’61. Interestingly, I didn’t have any experience in building, but I had a friend from the university days, a guy named Ted Daffer, and Ted Daffer achieved a lot of notoriety in college because he was an All-American tackle for the University of Tennessee. Ted had worked for a contracting company called Kenslow in Knoxville, and he wanted to be in business for himself, so we got together, we formed this little company, and Ted and I built The Sturm Addition. I think we built three houses and then moved on to other things.
Mr. McDaniel: So after that, what did you do? Like you said, you were relatively young. You sold your business. You didn’t know what you were going to do with yourself, so you bought this property.
Mr. Sturm: Well, no, I didn’t have any problem, because I was already doing all these things. I mean, I had had this construction company while I was running a store. And I was on these various boards while I was running my store. And I had Kramer Sturm Shoe – well, no, I had sold the business by then to Kramer. He owned – it changed from Kramer Sturm Shoe Store, to just Kramer’s. Could we break just a moment?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, let’s do that.
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Mr. McDaniel: Let me just ask you, are there any specific things that really stand out in your mind, as far as the city and the growth of the city or the hindrance to the growth of the city, things such as that, that you were involved in, not only as a business person but also as one of the civic leaders in the town?
Mr. Sturm: Well, earlier I had mentioned the fact that there was disposal, and people were allowed to buy or given the privilege of buying their homes at discounts, and how that was a problem, but we didn’t cover why it was a problem. In order for someone to move into Oak Ridge, since housing was a hundred percent full, there had to be a new unit built, which means there had to be a new lot developed. There were some old interior lots that weren’t used, and they were later used up. And there are still a few today that haven’t been built on. But a developer had to come in and develop the streets, put in the water lines, put in the sewer lines, put in underground electrical at some point. So the price of the lot became more than what just the houses sold for. The people who were fortunate to be buying government housing bought them at greatly reduced prices, but the new resident did not have that privilege. They had to buy a currently priced, built lot. And in the modern era, that’s around fifty thousand dollars, but in – going back into the ’50s and so on, you could develop a lot for four thousand dollars or five thousand dollars. Whereas, all around us, all around Oak Ridge – Knoxville, Kingston, Clinton – you could develop a lot for twelve hundred dollars, because the municipal governments or the county governments were putting in a lot of the infrastructure. In Oak Ridge, the developer had to put the infrastructure in, plus build the street. So a lot at four or five thousand dollars was basically sort of at cost. Then you had to build the house. Well, when minimum wage was forty cents back in the ��40s, I earned seventy-five cents an hour, which was well above minimum wage. Minimum wage was a quarter in 1943, or maybe it had advanced to forty cents by then. But this was now 1960s, and minimum wage was considerably higher. Plus, construction workers in a town like Oak Ridge didn’t earn minimum wage. The machinists, the carpenters, the brick layers, and so on, who worked for government were earning considerably above that. So contractors building houses in Oak Ridge had to come up with those wages. So a fairly modest home in the ’60s would be eighteen thousand dollars, nineteen thousand, compared to people owning homes at four thousand dollars. The income of these two families, one living in World War II Oak Ridge original housing, and now living in new Oak Ridge housing were the same. They were all earning about the same salaries. But this person lived with an appraisal on their home down here. This person, with the same income, lived with an appraisal there, which meant that all city services cost this same income person four times, five times what it cost the person living in government housing. So along comes a city project. Well, we need a new civic center and we’re going to vote whether we’re going to spend that money or not. People who live with good incomes but very low appraisal on their home were all for it, because it wasn’t going to cost them anything, or very little. Whereas the newcomer who earned the same amount of money, who had the same purchasing power as this person living with a low appraisal, had to pay much higher taxes. I remember the battle that we had, the letters that I wrote to the city about garbage collection used to be in the property tax rate. I said, “That’s unfair.” I mean, here’s a good income person living with this appraisal. If you put the garbage collection expense in the tax rate, it doesn’t cost them much. Whereas this family, their garbage pickup costs them a lot, because they’re living in a higher – the term would be the ratio of between income and the appraisal value of your home, that ratio. All newcomers moving into Oak Ridge housing had to pay considerably more for everything than the people who were fortunate to have these homes purchased at very low rates. Every time a vote came up – after all, in the early days, a hundred percent of the people lived in government housing, because government owned everything, but as the town became an independent community, and with property being sold, that wasn’t the case. So at first, only two percent of the people lived outside of government housing, then ten percent, then twenty percent. But the big voting block was down here. And so, yeah, we need a new civic center. Just put it in the tax rate. Same thing for schools: “Oh, we’re all for good schools,” because it wasn’t costing the people who lived in what you refer to as cemestos, or flat-tops, or government housing, former government housing – it wasn’t expensive for them. So it restricted new growth. Do you follow?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Sturm: Did I make that clear?
Mr. McDaniel: No, I understand. Yes, absolutely.
Mr. Sturm: And, to a degree, it still continues, because there’s still a lot of cemesto homes. Of course, the cemestos aren’t appraised anymore. We’ve had reappraisal. So some cemestos get up eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand dollars. But that still is considerably below a new construction.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, two hundred, two-hundred-and-fifty, three-hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars.
Mr. Sturm: I was in Oak Ridge just the other day and I drove through a new development that’s sort of off of Tuskegee Drive. And I drove through some of the new construction. And it was a very modest looking home in a modest street that was priced at three-hundred-and-forty thousand dollars.
Mr. McDaniel: Absolutely.
Mr. Sturm: Well, three-hundred-and-forty thousand dollars sounds like a mansion, you know. This is a very modest three-bedroom home, and on two stories to boot, so it’s really very small, stacked on very small. That person is probably earning no more than the person who’s living in the cemestos, but when the city puts something in the tax rate, it costs them.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Absolutely. Let’s move on. You were mentioning earlier about the vote on the sales tax.
Mr. Sturm: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Talk a little bit about that and the history of that.
Mr. Sturm: Well, again, appraisal of housing comes in. The perfect tax for a person is a tax that raises all the money you need to do the job, but doesn’t cost you anything. An example: Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge, where there’s outlet malls and commercial, commercial, commercial, but the permanent residents is about ten to twenty percent of the population. The perfect tax for Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge is a high sales tax, because it’s being paid for by tourists from all over the world, all over the country. The worst tax for them would – well, that’s the best tax because it raises the money the community needs for all of its infrastructure, its schools, running the maintenance departments and streets, and so on, is paid for by tourists. The local residents don’t pay much. The perfect tax in Oak Ridge for – and going back to the ’60s – for eighty percent of the residents was a property tax, not because the property rate wasn’t pretty high, but their appraisal was very low. So a good tax was a property tax. So when it came up to a sales tax – Oak Ridgers, again, as I mentioned earlier, have a pretty high IQ – it didn’t take them long to figure out if I have a high income, I’m buying more and I’m going to be paying sales tax. But if I finance the same expense through property taxes, it won’t cost me much. So Oak Ridge – not many people would admit this, but they were against the sales tax. But the city needed the revenue. And the first time it came to a vote, it failed.
Mr. McDaniel: About when was that, do you remember?
Mr. Sturm: I’m not remembering the years. And then it went to a second vote and failed. And the third time that it came up, some of the comments that I just made were appreciated, and not only that, but it got to the point where they just had to have more income, and the city voted in a sales tax over the protest of a lot of people. One of the committees I served on was the Superintendent of Schools Advisory Committee, and that sort of got me in trouble because the school system is the main recipient of Oak Ridge property taxes, and I was a known advocate of: “Let’s minimize property taxes, because it’s killing our growth, and let’s find other methods. Let’s find, first, more income through an item like a sales tax.” Of course, as a merchant, a sales tax is sort of punitive, because you spend money collecting that, but you don’t get paid very much for it. You have expense but no revenue. But I was a known advocate of wanting a sales tax, and also to minimize the expense of doing all of the things we do in Oak Ridge, because the high property taxes were keeping people from moving there, or from living there. In one session, the teachers union – the teachers and therefore the union – got very disturbed at my stance or my position, and [there] was talk of boycotting my store. After all, I was selling children’s clothing to kids that were in school. But that didn’t particularly affect my expression of what I really believed. But it was pretty interesting.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Okay, so let’s move on to after you bought that property where Bradley is, and then how long did you stay in Oak Ridge, and when did you move?
Mr. Sturm: Right. I got that in one of the early auctions, but then subsequently there were additional – there would be group blocks of auctions. I remember one time I bid on slightly over a million dollars bidding. These were all sealed bids: you put your bid down, you submit it in an envelope. And I did not have a million dollars to back that up. But I figured that if I were successful in my bidding, that I had, maybe, ten days or something that I could go around east Tennessee and raise the necessary money to buy property. And interestingly, each opening was like Superbowl Day, because it was huge excitement by those who participated, but Oak Ridgers typically weren’t interested. In fact, you know, why would you want to own property in Oak Ridge? So I ended up – was successful in getting a hundred acre tract on the west end of town, and a quarter of an acre here, and a ditch over there, and wetlands over here. In fact, one day, my wife said to me, “You ought to call your real estate activity the ‘S & D Real Estate Company.’” I said, “Sturm – what’s the D stand for? I mean, your name is Francis. I know what the S is, Sturm. And D?” And she said, “Oh, no, not Sturm; it’s Swamps and Ditches.” [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Oh, my.
Mr. Sturm: Because I didn’t have money to bid on.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Sturm: So the pieces I bought were not too consequential. But almost without exception, it proved a very right thing to do. One fortuitous thing that happened was, I bought a two-acre tract, and it had gone through many bids and nobody had ever bid on it, and I just bid the minimum price, which was eighteen hundred dollars. It was a two-acre tract on the west end of town. My wife didn’t think it was a good idea, because as wonderful as my wife was, she was conservative also. Then I’m in my store one day, and a man comes in and he says, “You know, I saw on the plat that you’ve got this piece of land out on the west end of town. Would you sell it?” I said, “Yes.” And he says, “Well, what do you want for it?” I said, “Well, I don’t have much of an idea. What do you think you’re willing to pay for it?” He says, “Well, I want to put a small office building there. Would you sell it for seventy-five thousand dollars?” And I gulped, and I said, “No.” I said, ��You can buy it, but I’m not going to sell it to you.” I said, “I’m going to gift it, and you can buy it from the party I gift it to.” So I gave part of it to the Oak Ridge School System and part to the Synagogue, the Jewish Congregation of Oak Ridge that I belonged to. And with the part that went to the Congregation, it acted as the seed money to do an addition to the building. Then the part that went to the school went into a scholarship endowment and this is the thirty-fourth year that we’re awarding scholarships to the Oak Ridge High School that the seniors who enter into competition – one interesting thing that happened in this competition is that, at first, we gave part of the funds based on need, and part based on competition. After a few years, we realized that we were getting a lot more bang for the buck based on competition. The students who got it based upon their financial need and their academics took it casually. It didn’t do anything for them. Those who won it in competition, it gave a huge boost to their self-image. And even if it went to someone whose parents could’ve paid for the same funds, they felt like, “I’m helping.” It sort of affects my attitude towards welfare in general, that if there’s just a handout, it does nothing for self-esteem, where if it’s done based upon being productive, it raises self-esteem. We’re now in our thirty-fourth year, and the total amount that’s been awarded has been a hundred-and-ten thousand dollars. Each year there’s anywhere from three to five winners, so they’re small scholarships, but the long-term impact is good.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Looking back, what would you say your life in Oak Ridge – I mean, your time in Oak Ridge, how did it impact you? How did it impact you personally?
Mr. Sturm: Well, I’m really chauvinistic about Oak Ridge. My wife and I picked Oak Ridge as a place to live over all other places because of the wonderful mix of human beings that were already there when we arrived, people with high character, people who cared about life – so Oak Ridge was a wonderful choice for us, because we were in an environment that had so much to offer, one, good schools. My three children graduated from there, and in the Oak Ridge High School, they were average or maybe a little above average, but not the top students by any means. So just as average students in the Oak Ridge School System, or slightly above average, all three graduated from college with the highest honors, two of the three with highest honors, summa cum laude, and one with cum laude. So the Oak Ridge School System had a powerful impact. Wonderful schools, wonderful human beings. The culture, entertainment, infrastructure, libraries – I mean, I grew up in a town with no public library, and no tennis courts, and no outdoor playing ball fields with lights, and no indoor swimming pool or outdoor swimming pool. Oak Ridge had all the infrastructure. I’ll go back to the growth issue. I’m reminded I had an employee in my store, Dolores, and her husband worked at the plant. Dolores worked in my children’s store. They lived in Oak Ridge, and then she told me that she was going to have to resign because they were moving to Lenoir City – because they couldn’t get the housing they needed in Oak Ridge, so they moved to Lenoir City. I used to do lap swimming for health and because I love the water. One day, a few years later, I’m swimming at the Oak Ridge indoor swimming pool, and I run into Dolores’s husband. And I said, “Well, glad to see you. Why are you over?” He says, “Well, I have a scout troop in Lenoir City, and I brought the kids over to swim in the Oak Ridge Civic Center pool.” Bam, it hit me: they couldn’t afford housing in Oak Ridge because it was expensive in Oak Ridge. The taxes were high because we had indoor swimming pools and playgrounds. They moved to Lenoir City. They don’t pay Oak Ridge taxes, but they come to Oak Ridge for recreation. Not only does he come, but he brings his scout group with him. You know, it’s so subtle some of the mistakes that we make. Oak Ridge has a tuition that if you live in town, you go to school, but if you live in Norris or Clinton and you come to the Oak Ridge school, you have to pay a tuition fee. I’m not sure what it is today, but I think it’s maybe in the four thousand dollar range. It may be slightly higher. But they only pay that for the two or three or four years or six years that their kid is in school. When that kid is not in school, they’re not paying for Oak Ridge schools. So Oak Ridge proved a wonderful environment in which to live. And it was probably one of the best decisions that my wife and I ever made was to live our married life in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: All right, well, thank you so much. I certainly appreciate it. I’m sure we could go on for hours, but –
Mr. Sturm: Oh, I’ll give you the reason why I left Oak Ridge. You never do something, at least I rarely do, or most people don’t, for one reason; it’s an accumulation of reasons. But when our kids were gone to college, gone off to school, not coming back home, I said, “Well, you know, I’d like to live in one more place before we live in a retirement center, or a nursing home.” So we started looking in Oak Ridge to maybe move into a condominium. We went out with one realtor who was developing a site, and he was planning single family homes and then some condos of good quality. It looked pretty good, but then he said, “Well, we’re going to do the houses now, but it’ll be about three years before we start the condominium project.” Well, I was now in my seventies. I didn’t want to – what – the lady who didn’t – she says, “I don’t buy green bananas, you know.” We didn’t want to wait three years. We looked around and we found this lovely spot. We’re sitting on a lake, Fort Loudon Lake, with a boat dock down here. I don’t have any boat anymore, but I used to. I’m eighteen minutes from Oak Ridge, and it was a good move. But there are many reasons why you make a decision like that. And I’m in Oak Ridge often. I still belong to the Rotary Club there, and I get in for meetings, and I go to meet friends, and my wife, who passed away seven years ago, is buried in the cemetery in Oak Ridge, and I go over there, so I still have – and I still belong to my congregation in Oak Ridge. But all in all, it was a brilliant decision to move to Oak Ridge in the first place. And we lived a very – and our children got the very best education. But we, too, have exported them. Two are living in the Denver area, and one lives here in Knoxville.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Mr. Sturm: It was my pleasure.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
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